Fundraising alone not enough to tackle global poverty

Nov 22 2009 by Jasbir Authi, Birmingham Post

A national campaign to tackle global poverty is being launched in Birmingham. Jasbir Authi reports

As Birmingham’s religious groups get together during the country’s first Inter Faith Week, Audrey Miller is on a mission to recruit them to her cause.

The tireless campaigner from the Jubilee Debt Campaign wants to see how religions utilise their congregations and followers to tackle poverty in their countries of origin.

The group, which has campaigned to stop poor countries being forced to pay money to the rich world, is moving away from big publicity events designed to attract the attention of world leaders and instead is calling on the city’s rich religious diversity as another way of delivering its message.

It is asking representatives from the Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh and other religions to help in its new national project, called The Global Poverty, Seeking Justice – People of Faith in Action.

Mrs Miller, a former teacher from Selly Park, said: “If you look at all the faiths in Birmingham, they all have compassion at their heart.

“We have been working together in a modest way for ten or 12 years and we hope to appoint a worker in Birmingham who would engage with all the faiths. We want all the religious groups committed to tackling global poverty. We are not there to convert anyone as this is a neutral area..”

For example, Sikhs give money to villages in India and Muslims undertake projects to improve the infrastructure in Islamic countries.

Unlike most pensioners, Mrs Miller has no wish to spend her retirement in the garden, but plans to act as she always has done, trying to free the world’s poorest countries from the burden of crippling debt.

Her campaigning began in 1965, when she returned from a year-long teaching stint in Malawi. But she realised that fundraising alone was not enough if you wanted to get to the heart of tackling debt.