This was the title of a conference I attended this week. It was run by the Government Office for the South East (GOSE). How many have ever heard of this body, I wondered. It is an arm of government, with 600 civil servants in Guildford, not directly responsible to any electorate. But do we want any more levels of elected government? Anyway, reps from the GOSE mingled with local authority officers and community workers, both voluntary and salaried. In fact this networking was more useful than the formal sessions; at least I thought so, talking with a Chaplain to the Police, a member of the Bahia community, a Crown Prosecutor, a local government policy analyst, several reps of Councils of Churches and Islamic Trusts — as well as others I already knew.
In an introductory review, a GOSE rep noted that more people identified themselves by their faith than by their ethnic origin. The morning sessions compared and contrasted a Borough Council initiative to form a Faith Partnership to work with the council in community policy and action with, in another city, the formation of a Council of Faiths completely independent of local authority support. The former had enabled swift responses – a multi-faith statement on the 7/7 bombings and a Tsunami appeal. The latter had over a longer period survived over-expectation to provide an arena where differences and similarities could be expressed frankly, with shared hope of steadily forming fruitful mutual acceptance in a multi-faith society.
The afternoon was devoted to workshops – on faith and new communities, faith representation on Local Strategic Partnerships, faith and young people, engaging under represented faith groups. I went to one on service provision. This debated the old theme of the difference between faith communities and ethnic communities and the degree of overlap. It was unresolved but it was agreed that there was still work to be done in understanding and respecting cultural/faith sensitivities in provision of services by both statutory and voluntary bodies.
All in all, a thought-provoking day. We can be assured that Government, both national and local is listening to and recognises it needs cooperation from people of faith. Community cohesion is a nebulous concept, but it is easy to see that we all need to work at it if we are to be secure and happy.