John Sherbourne

General Election Special Actions

Although some of us might have felt a bit like Brenda from Bristol, when the General Election was announced, it remains a great opportunity for us to build the power of Leeds Citizens and advance our campaigns.

We are running a special action over the next month to make the most of this and are asking for your help to make it a success.

Leeds Citizens is organising meetings with candidates in all Leeds constituencies in the run-up to June 8th. We will be asking them directly to:

• Support our priority campaigns (mental health, Living Wage, opportunities for young people) locally, within their party and at Westminster;
• Meet with us again within 100 days of being elected;
• Commit to an ongoing working relationship with Leeds Citizens through the duration of the Parliament.

How can you take part?

1. We need volunteers to join the teams to meet with candidates in their local constituency. The teams will be briefed and supported by our Senior Organiser, Tom. If you live in one of the following constituencies and would like to take part please contact us now:

2. We need organisations who are willing to host a meeting with a candidate on their premises. All we need is a hall or meeting room, nothing fancy. If you’re able to host, please let me know ASAP.

3. If you are a leader in your community, please promote this opportunity to people in your community and send us a list of people who want to join the team. We want to match people to meetings within their own constituency, so please ask volunteers to note their constituency (or post code, if they aren’t sure), so they can meet the right candidates.

4. For those who can’t make these specific events, but are attending other hustings or meet a candidate on the doorstep, we will be providing a short briefing on our campaign areas with key questions for candidates, to help you contribute to this action and keep candidates on their toes!

We are prioritising this action over the next month as it has potential to help advance all our campaigns. Please let us know if you can volunteer ASAP. We need to move quickly.

Please also remind people to register to vote. The deadline is Monday 22nd May. You can register online at: www.gov.uk/register-to-vote

As much as we seek relationships with elected officials, the most important office is the one which we all share: citizen. Let’s use this election period, through voting and action, to build a bit more trust and participation in our democracy.

There’s an old adage that says “you’re never too old to learn” and whilst that’s undoubtable true four MBC members are proving that there’s also no age limit when it comes to encouraging others to learn.

That’s why each week Jan Brown, Jan Fennell, Diane Sunter and John Sherbourne sign in at Allerton Church of England Primary School to hear pupils read.

Currently the two Jans are working alongside children in Year 5 whilst Diane and John are focussing on Year 6 – that’s the children’s final year in Primary school. The three ladies, as either former teachers or TA’s all have experience in the field of education whereas John who is also one of the school’s co-opted governors comes from a very different world: journalism.  

So if you can spare a couple of hours a week and would like to join the team have a word with John because he’s in absolutely no doubt that if you do either Allerton C of E and/or at least three other local Primary schools will snatch your hand off.

Many thanks to Martyn Gray and Kate Slater for sending in this brilliant set of pictures, and also to everyone who was involved in organising this great weekend.

Just one year on from its official opening The Barn Coffee Shop, a social enterprise café based in the grounds of Meanwood Valley Urban Farm, is proving so popular that it has been able to give three local community groups grants totaling £5,000.

They are: Stainbeck United Reform Church, InterACT (a joint church and community partnership) and the café’s neighbour Meanwood Valley Urban Farm.

At a party to mark the Coffee Shop’s first birthday project manager Andrew MacBean reminded guests that besides serving some wonderful coffee and cakes The Barn provides a warm and welcoming meeting place for a number of local community groups which in turn gives them the opportunity to develop and promote new and challenging initiatives.

“Today” he said, “on our first birthday it’s not only a real treat to be able to hand over such a significant amount of money, it’s also a chance for me to say a huge thank you lto our directors, our staff and to all our brilliant volunteers.”

We hear much about recycling, and everyone in Leeds has a Green Bin into which we are supposed to put all our household waste material that can be recycled. Please read the leaflet on recycling that our City Council has recently circulated. Why is this so important? When our various possessions reach the end of their useful lives, whether worn-out or not, we are faced with the tasks of disposal and replacement. If we take a moment to consider the natural world, we can see that nature recycles all of its materials. Dead vegetation decays, and the compost can be returned to the soil. Even large plants like trees are recycled by fungi when they die. Likewise dead animals are cleared up by scavengers.

Mankind however, produces mountains of waste materials, which can be unsightly and cause nasty, polluting effects. At the outset, we take huge quantities of virgin material from the Earth to make our products, and then discard items when we have finished with them. Increasingly, we discard things well before they are worn out, and they may be perfectly serviceable, but we just fancy the latest model. A large advertising industry now exists just to persuade us to continually up-date and to up-grade our stuff. At all costs, we must avoid filling landfill sites, and discarding useful and serviceable items. We must emulate nature, and ‘close the loop’.

What can we do?

• If you have items to dispose of consider donating them to a good cause such as St Gemma’s hospice, or St George’s Crypt, rather than selling them on e-bay. Last year St. Gemma’s raised 25% of their annual running costs via their chain of charity shops. They will take books, CD’s, items of clothing, household goods, TV sets, etc.
• Items of furniture can be given to the Leeds and Moortown furniture store.
• Recycle as much household waste as you can. The Leeds City Council green bin will take paper and card, empty food tins, foil trays, tops from jam and preserve jars, drink cans, empty aerosols such as hair spray, deodorant, biscuit and sweet tins, etc.
• Most plastic items carry the little recycling triangle symbol. Those bearing the numbers 1, 2 and 4, can be put into your green bin. Plastic magazine wrappers can be recycled at Sainsbury’s Moortown store. I have seen all these being recycled into useful, durable plastic products for the construction industry.
• Take empty bottles and jars to the bottle bank, they can be recycled as cullet to make more glass.

Why is this important?

If we recycle and re-use our materials, we reduce the demand for virgin materials that have to be extracted from nature. The extracting, transporting, and processing of materials consumes huge amounts of energy. If we recycle, we are saving both materials and energy, and cutting down on pollution – we are caring for God’s creation.

John Sturges                 j.sturges@leedsbeckett.ac.uk;

Julia Hyliger                 julia.hyliger@hotmail.co.uk;

April 2017

Huge congratulations to everyone at The Leeds and Moortown Furniture Store on being awarded The Duke of York’s Community Initiative – for the second time.

This prestigious prize is awarded to community groups and charities throughout Yorkshire who are deemed by the Initiative’s Assessors to be making a very real difference to the communities they serve.

The Store, as many of you will already know, began life here at MBC in 1986. Today, more than thirty years on it is based in a 10,000 sq ft warehouse in Seacroft, collects and then gives away more than 6,000 separate items of furniture every year, runs a wholly owned retail arm and employs seven staff.

The Store first collected the DOYCI award in 2011, and as is the scheme’s practice it was invited to reapply in 2016.

This year’s ceremony was held in St Paul’s Hall at Huddersfield University and was attended by more than two hundred representatives from the 42 successful organisations. Presenting the award to LMFS’ General Manager John Gamson, Dr Ingrid Roscoe The Lord-Lieutenant of West Yorkshire commented on how vital the type of work the store does is and thanked everyone for their commitment.

With John at Huddersfield were driver Robbie and two of the store’s volunteers Peter and Danny. Next month, however, three of the team will be travelling to St James’ Palace, London to attend a reception hosted by the scheme’s Patron HRH The Duke of York.The picture above shows John Gamson (second left) with Dr Roscoe (centre) and representative of the other sixteen West Riding based organistaions that were presented with the award.

Last Monday evening we hosted the second of our Being Baptist, Being MBC sessions and fifteen people met here at MBC to look at church membership and what it means to be Baptist.

Here’s a link to a summary of some of the stuff we thought about and shared. If having read it you find that this is something that interests you have a chat with Shona Shaw, Graham Brownlee or with any member of the leadership team, they would be delighted to tell you more.