Responding to Poverty
To understand more about poverty in your area, or in neighbouring areas, you might use:
The Church of England Research and Statistics Unit:
Government Indices of Multiple Deprivation are helpfully summarised and displayed, along with much else, on an interactive map. For best results, click on the ‘Map Legend’ icon, then LSOA Census and Deprivation Summary, then zoom in on local areas.
Church Urban Fund lookup tool:
A simple summary of these statistics for your parish is provided by Church Urban Fund here.
Local Trust:
A funder which supports local communities with long-term, unconditional, resident-led funding. They commissioned research that identified 225 ‘left behind’ neighbourhoods across England. Their residents have markedly worse socioeconomic outcomes than the residents of other equally deprived areas. This suggests the value and importance of social infrastructure. Residents in areas benefitting from it do better on all the key metrics: health, employment, education, skills and household income. They have produced a list of all the parishes in England where at least 5% lie within ‘left behind’ neighbourhoods. There are 230 parishes where this figure is 40% or more and 22 of these lie within the Diocese of Chester. You can see this more clearly on this map:
More local information might be found in conversation with Citizens Advice Bureau, doctors surgeries, local councillors’ surgeries, voluntary sector groups.
The Growing Good Toolkit aims to help church explore their social action and discipleship. It is a six session course from Church Urban Fund.