£1.5m in mutual support for poorer dioceses

“We are incredibly grateful for this funding, and it has been of great value in the crucial work we undertake with refugees. It has enabled us to fund our Kent Refugee Programmes Manager who has helped us with our projects which intend to create genuine long-term social bonds and expand the social network of our community. Some of our programmes include:

Welcome Hubs for Ukrainian refugees

English language lessons and employment support

Welcome Café supporting refugees and people seeking sanctuary living in the Canterbury area

Work with schools

As part of the role, our Kent Refugee Programmes Manager is the national representative for the Church of England for Community Sponsorship, a settlement scheme aimed at placing the community at the heart of welcoming those in need of international protection. Work in this role resulted in the publishing of a document to engage churches and community sponsorship groups in the government Safe and Legal Routes Cap Consultation process for refugees resettled into the UK.”

“The Diocese of Liverpool is hugely grateful for the generous support from the Diocese of Oxford. It was particularly striking that it came without restriction or preconditions. In many ways that made the award doubly significant.

We thought long and hard about how best to use the money. We have always tried to frame debates about money in our diocese around missional choice – money can either open up missional choice and opportunity or, if the money is not there, it closes them down. In that spirit we felt it right to honour the Oxford gift by opening up a new and significant area of missional opportunity.

We landed on the issue of racial justice and, in particular, how we might properly respond to the From Lament to Action report. Given Liverpool’s connection with the slave trade this is a particular issue for us. It was also an area where we had been unable to generate any significant resource from an already over-heated diocesan budget. We also recognised the possibility of scaling up resource in this area through a dedicated national church funding stream, although there was the inevitable circularity to this position. We had to have the capacity to enable us to access the money.

We therefore committed the money to fund the costs of a Racial Justice Officer for the diocese and cathedral for 5 years. We appointed an outstanding person, Jennie Taylor, who started work in August 2022. In the early days Jennie did a lot of talking and listening which she then refined into a diocesan strategy which looks at how we move from repentance to repair. This strategy was presented to the national church and we secured a grant of £196,000 to take it forward over the next 3 years. We are confident of securing further support as we develop the work further.

The support from the Diocese of Oxford, supplemented by support from the national church, will be transformational. We recognise that transformational is a significantly over-used word, but we are confident in this case that it is rightly used. We can now move at pace and scale in delivering our strategy and moving from repentance to repair in this key area. We see this both as a matter of justice and a missional opportunity. None of this would have happened without the support from the Diocese of Oxford. We are and remain enormously grateful.”

“The additional funds we have received from Oxford’s generosity have been used to fund a pioneer minister within a newly established Bishop’s Mission Order (BMO) across four deprived benefices in South East Northumberland.

The Oxford funding pushed us to form a BMO to provide an additional priest. But this then unlocked a £300k grant from a local charity to fund a youth project across the BMO over three years and we have two of the three youth workers in post and they are based at a school which serves the whole area. 

It has taken time to get everything up and running… but the Oxford funding essentially helped release energy into a deprived former coal mining area and has opened up opportunity for others to provide funding to boost what we are aiming to achieve through the BMO.”