How can Christians in West Yorkshire respond to recent riots and racism? How can we build a better society? This was the theme of the recent Caritas Catholic Care Day of Reflection. Caritas Catholic Care focus on social action – what services can and should the Diocese provide to help those in need? This ranges from supporting older people to the Gianna Baby Bank to helping Syrian refugees get settled in Yorkshire to providing counselling in schools.
However, at the same time as responding to immediate need, we also need to respond to the root causes of problems such as racism, homelessness and local poverty. This is where SPARK comes in – SPARK is the J&P project working with younger people and is all about helping people tackle these root causes of social injustices. SPARK were invited to have a stall and also to do a short presentation to explain what SPARK Social Justice is all about.
One of the SPARK community is Lucy, a student teacher from St Winefride’s parish in Wibsey, Bradford. She came along and stole the show with an amazing and inspirational presentation in which she described her work helping young people to engage creatively with Catholic Social Teaching. Lucy has already organised events in her parish exploring themes to do with refugees and asylum seekers and the Season of Creation. All SPARK has done is to support the passion that Lucy already has for social justice. We are also sponsoring Lucy to undertake some training with Citizens UK. This will give Lucy a whole new set of skills to explore issues in more depth with other people and to engage them more easily.
Pictured here with Lucy is Tom Allan. Tom became involved with SPARK during our pilot project, when he was
still a student at St Mary’s school Menston, and featured in a number of the videos that we did during the COVID lockdowns. Now in his final year at University, Tom has continued to be involved and is a member of the Project Steering Group – ensuring that the voices of young people guide how the project develops and the sorts of thing that we do.