Civil Society Media has published a new podcast episode, with Paul Parker, recording clerk of Quakers in Britain and chair of this year’s upcoming Faith Charities Forum.
In this episode, Paul Parker talks about the relationship between government and faith charities, the importance of charities campaigning and the legacy of Quaker philanthropists in today’s voluntary sector.
You can listen to the interview now below or on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and Pocket Casts, where you can find our other podcast episodes.
AI-generated transcript
Rob Preston:
Hello and welcome to another podcast from civil society media. In this episode, I spoke to Paul Parker about his role as recording clerk for Quakers in Britain. We talked about the relationship between government and faith charities, the importance of charities campaigning and the legacy of Quaker philanthropists in today's voluntary sector. Paul is set to chair this year's faith charities forum, sponsored by rathbones, which will take place in London this September. If you'd like to attend, you can buy discounted tickets until the second of August, offering great value for a full day of learning and networking. I hope you enjoy listening to my chat with Paul as much as I did recording it, and I'll speak to you again at the end.
RP:
Paul Parker, thank you very much for agreeing to do this civil society podcast with us. How you doing?
Paul Parker:
I'm well, thanks. Thanks for having me.
RP:
Thank you. So one of the reasons we've got you onto this podcast is that you're going to speak chairing the faith charities forum in later this year. How are you feeling about that? Chairing the conference.
PP:
I'm really excited about it. I think it's going to be a great day on the 18th of September. We've got some great speakers lined up, and I think I've been coming to the faith charities forum for a few years as a participant, and always found it a really stimulating day. So I'm really looking forward to seeing everybody again and to having some great discussions.
RP:
Excellent. Okay, so we'll talk a bit more about some of the discussions that are going to be taking place later on, but first we could talk a bit about yourself. So you're the recording clerk for Quakers in Britain, and you've been in that role for 13 years.
PP:
That's right. Yeah, I can't quite believe it started in 2011 and been here ever since, based at friends house in Euston. Excellent.
RP:
And is that, was that your first involvement with the Quaker community, or I mentioned you might have been involved for a while before then?
PP:
Yeah, I've been a Quaker for most of my life. I suppose I've found my way to Quakers. When I was about 12 or 13, I was looking for a kind of faith experience that suited me, and tried out various things, and found that the Quaker approach both the kind of sitting in stillness together and kind of waiting for spiritual guidance to come, but also the fact that there isn't a fixed set of beliefs that really worked well for me and I met the most amazing People who were really putting their faith into action in different ways in their lives, and found them very inspiring. So that kept me going to Quaker meeting. And when Quakers were looking for someone to take on this senior staff role that I have, they wanted someone who'd obviously who was a Quaker, but also got some management experience and some leadership experience, and I had that from the work I've been doing before in education. So it was quite a good fit, and certainly found it an interesting challenge for the last few years.
RP:
Okay, What work are you doing in education?
PP:
So I was a German teacher, and then I was assistant head of a big secondary school. I did the timetable, that sort of thing. So I suppose lots of things, I think I don't I think lots of teachers have got transferable skills that are really useful in the charity sector. You have to be a good organiser and a good communicator, and you have to be good at kind of managing lots of interpersonal relationships. I think for lots of us in charity leadership, that's a pretty useful skill set.
RP:
Would you say you've had to use those skills, I guess, quite a lot over the last 13 years in your current role.
PP:
Yeah, every day, I think so. Yeah. I mean, when I was a kid, I decided, ironically, I decided I never wanted to have a job where I had to sit in an office. So I've been the kind of charity leader who spends as much time out of his office as I possibly can. But I also learned that I'm no good if I've got a job where I'm bored. And so again, this this sector, I think, really suits me. There's endless interest and a chance to kind of bring your own passion to work. So it's that's exciting every day.
RP:
Has your role changed much in the last decade or so that you've been there?
PP:
I suppose it has. I mean, the pandemic has changed all sorts of things for us. We work really differently. I think some of those things were coming anyway, and it really accelerated the process of change. We started out when I came 13 years ago as an organisation where almost all of the staff sat in an office in central London, and we've become an organisation where people are based all over the country. I think we're better placed to support. Quaker community we work with as a result, because people are kind of close, can turn up on a Sunday morning and meet people from the Quaker community much more easily than if they were all having to come out from London. I think it's really shifted the relationship between our kind of grassroots community, who we work with, and our national organisation. We're no longer kind of a bunch of people in an office up there in London who are hundreds of miles away and don't really get it in people's eyes, brought it all much closer to home. So that's that's worked really well. So that's a big change. And I think, I mean, all of us in the charity sector have seen a lot of change in the environment we work in. I've been particularly concerned about charity sector's ability to campaign and our ability to influence government and to really bring about change that's got a lot worse over the last decade or so. We'll see with the general election this year whether there's a change to that, or whether it carries on being a really difficult environment for charities to operate in,
RP:
yeah, okay, yeah. We might talk a bit more about that in a moment, but for people who don't know, so your organisation is the national Quakers in Britain organisation, there's a network of about 70 charities. Is that right?
PP:
Yeah, so it's about 70 local charities. In fact, each of those is a group of Quaker meetings. So there's about 450 Quaker communities around the country, of various kinds. You know, small ones, large ones, rural ones, urban ones, the real mix. But in most of England, Wales and Scotland, you're not more than 10 miles from your nearest Quaker meeting, unless you're really in the back of beyond. So we work with them, but we also work nationally on behalf of Quakers for a whole range of causes connected with peace and climate justice and social justice of various kinds. So we're a really interesting mix between a kind of umbrella organisation that provides support to local groups and a national and even international organisation that campaigns and works on particular issues at scale.
RP:
Yeah. And outside of your organisation, I'm always interested in. There's so many charities that seem to have they've been Quakers, have been involved in their formation, and there's some guess more obvious ones, like Barra Cadbury and Joseph Rowntree Foundation, but I've been looking into, because it's the RNLI and RSPCA 200th year anniversary, and there were some Quakers involved in the formations of those chances, I think one or two.
PP:
So yeah, and Oxfam started with a group of Quakers who formed a committee in Oxford. So there are, I mean, I think it's true of all faith communities, actually, and it's one of the reasons that the faith charities forum is such a thriving event, is that, you know, for lots of people of faith, and I think this is particularly true of Quakers, there's no point having a faith if you don't do something with it. You know, it tells you something about the sort of world we're trying to create and how we should be with one another. And therefore, if you're really true to your faith, then you take that into the world and try to change things. So the Quakers from early on, didn't separate the everyday, from from their kind of religious life. It wasn't something, still isn't something where, you know, you go off and you do your faith piece for an hour on a Sunday morning and then the rest of the time you can do what you like. It's, you know, I don't think, I don't think most people of faith see it like that. It's about it, you know, it's about who you are, how you are, how you how you exist in the world, how you interact with everybody else. So if you can see that there's some great injustice being perpetuated, well then you're going to try and do something about it. You might set up an organisation, or pull together a group of people who could do something about it, and and lots of those things have become the kind of big name charities that we see in the sector today. That's, that's right, the heart of how, certainly, how the UK charity sector kind of came into being. Yeah. I think that you know that faith stuff goes right back to the beginning of it.
RP:
Well, indeed, yeah. So one source that I've found credits the phrase speak truth to power to a Quaker pamphlet in the 1950s which, yeah, which links into what he was saying about charities' abilities to campaign.
PP:
Yeah,that was Bayard Rustin. In fact, we think who was a great Quaker, racial justice campaigner in the US, alongside Martin Luther King and and others, he was a fascinating man. There's a recent documentary about him, in fact, but you know, speaking out for racial justice before that was a thing people spoke out about. And that sense of kind of being true to what you believe, and speaking that truth to power is really important to us in Quakers, and is, you know, for me, it's one of the reasons that we've been involved in this work on protecting the right to campaign is that for us, that's a religious freedom thing. You know, if we can't go to government and say, here is the truth as we see it, and you need to to hear what we've got to say, because somebody's put a whole load of lobbying regulations around it that stop us speaking out what for us is a religious truth, then that's, you know, that's a really serious restriction on our on our religious liberty. So, yeah, that's right at the core of who we are. I mean, you mentioned Joseph Rowntree earlier, and he is really well known for his insight that, you know there are, he talked about feeding people who were very poor, and said, well, you'll always find people who help you set up a soup kitchen, but you won't necessarily find the people who'll get to the root of why people are starving in the first place, and really challenge the root causes of it, and take that knowledge to power and and sort of challenge those in power to do something about it, so that that sense of speaking truth to power, even if the phrase is a 20th century one, that that tradition of doing that, I Think, has arrived back deep roots in the Quaker movement.
RP:
That's interesting in in the last when the last general election happened, you signed a letter, along with many other people, to the prime ministerial candidates that you were urging them to provide greater freedom for civil society advocacy and campaigning. And then only a couple of years ago, you said the atmosphere around charity campaigning was still pretty hostile. How would you compare now to five years ago? There's been quite a few changes, I suppose, in the environment, there's this new leadership, but the Charity Commission, has it got any better? Has it got worse? What would you say?
PP:
I think in terms of the regulator, it's a bit better than it was. I think there is a welcome acknowledgement that campaigning is part of what charities do, and that we're right to do it, and that if we weren't doing it, we wouldn't be really fulfilling our purpose. And I'm grateful to to Orlando Fraser and the leadership of commission for kind of emphasising that. The bit that worries me still about it is a sense that charities should always kind of do that nicely. And I think I'd like to agree with that, you know, quite a nice person, and I generally want to be nice to other people, but I think sometimes charities do have a duty to kind of express a bit of righteous anger on behalf of their beneficiaries when you've done the nice bit, and actually that hasn't been heard, and some kind of injustice carries on happening. I think, you know, then you get the sorts of scandals that happen to, you know, the Windrush generation, that the post office people, the Grenfell people, where, you know, we shouldn't be nice about things like that. We should be absolutely furious. And I don't think it's the job of a Charity Commission to police whether we're nice or not. I think it's their job to police whether we are exercising our charitable purpose effectively or not. And sometimes I think charitable purpose means you've got to get pretty cross, because, you know, there's a bunch of policies that have been in place over the last decade or so that are not working, that are pulling people in the opposite direction, we've got some pretty scandalous social statistics about poverty. At the moment, for example, the number of children growing up in poverty has escalated hugely. It's all very well going along and nicely asking for that to change, but actually, I think we need to go along and have a good, good old shout.
RP:
That's interesting, yeah. So a lot of the communications, particularly with sort of Orlando frozen, as you've mentioned, some of it's around encouraging charities to adopt a kinder tone, and they've kind of compared it to perhaps some of the mainstream politicians who've not used such good such a. So not creating such a good environment and perhaps holding charities to a bit of a higher standard. But would you say that's a bit unhelpful?
PP:
I mean, I think it's fine to hold charities to a higher standard. I think we're trying to hold everybody else to a high standard, and if we're not living up to that ourselves, people should say so. But I don't think niceness is the standard we're after. I think effective, determined, committed, you know, really driven by the needs of our beneficiaries and the people we're advocating for. That's how I want to be judged. And if it looks like that, we're kind of self serving money wasters. Well, absolutely somebody should point that out, but I don't think most charities are in that space. I think we're in a kind of passionate, committed, determined slog to try and get things to be better. That's what drives those of us who are in the sector to keep going, because we can see that people are suffering and that, you know, the world is not yet the fair, just equal, respectful place that we want it to be. Yeah.
RP:
And that brings us to the Faith Charities Forum, which the theme for that this year is exploring our potential as agents of unity and increasingly polarised society. Yeah, so you said you're looking forward to chairing this year's event. Do you think expecting some lively debates?
PP:
I hope so. I'd be really disappointed if there aren't some. I think it's it's really important that we come together and think about how faiths can work together. We've got a massive amount in common across different faith communities. You know, the world's religions have far more in common and divides us to coin a phrase. And you know, therefore there's lots we can agree on about the importance of treating people well, importance of making sure that people who are in poverty are supported, the importance of positive social change, improving people's chances, all sorts of things that we can agree on easily. I think it's really easy at the moment in society, and we're seeing it a bit in this general election campaign as well. Sadly, for people to be kind of set up against each other. It's interesting that you know, a few weeks ago, a much valued charity, the interfaith network, which is one of the places where faith communities could come together and really meet on equal terms with each other, had to close because its government funding was pulled over what I can only describe as a kind of personal argument that Michael Gove decided to pick with them about who their trustees should be, which is pretty outrageous behaviour from our Secretary of State. And you know, in response, when the government was challenged about, well, how do you see faiths working together, they talked about the sort of funding they're putting into organisations which protect faiths from one another, rather than organisations which actually promote dialogue and cohesion and togetherness. So one of the reasons for really wanting that theme for the faith charities Forum this year was a sense that you know now, of all times we should be looking for the common ground, building the relationships across different communities. There are amazing people in all faith traditions involved in charitable work, and we're stronger if we do that work together and understand one another and build the connections than if we somehow separate off and try and do it in silos within our own distinct communities, that doesn't feel like the way we bring about a kind of more cohesive country that we need?
RP:
Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, we've got Hassan Joudi from the Interfaith Network is going to be speaking at the at the forum, and yes, he was one of the people involved in in the interfaith network, and the government cited his membership of the Muslim Council of Britain as Part of the reason for their decision on funding his he's talking on the panel about the relationship between faith charities and government. Do you think is this just one bad example the interfaith network was the as the relationship changed more generally in recent years? Do you think between faith charities and government?
PP:
I think, I mean, I think it changes all the time, and lots of different charities will have their own experiences. You know, Faith Charities is a really broad umbrella. You've got organisations like Islamic Relief and Christian age and a big international NGOs at one end of it. And you've got, you know, very small. Organisations doing particular things in the local community, at the other end of that spectrum, and I think people have really different experiences. I think probably what we'll find in common is that lots of faith charities find it difficult to talk to state agencies, whether that's government or to local authorities or whatever. And I think a lot of that is to do with a lack of understanding of what makes faith charities tick, and a suspicion that's still around, however hard we try to disappe that faith charities only exist to convert people to a particular faith. The vast majority of faith charities are providing some kind of service. If you go to a, for example, a hospice because you're reaching the end of your life, and it happens to be a faith based organisation, as many hospices are, they're not trying to convert you, they're just trying to make sure that your life ends as comfortably and as well as possible, and to support you and your family through that, so that that needn't be something where you know a potential funder looks at that organisation and says, Oh, we shouldn't fund them because they're a faith organisation. It's not the right question to be asking. The question is, no, is this a an organisation that does this work well and needs to be part of the community that we're trying to create. So so I think you know different different organisations will have their own experience, but I do think that issue comes up very commonly when I talk to leaders of other faith organisations and people sometimes miss some of the benefits around the kind of relationship that faith charities can have with grassroots communities. There are plenty of places, particularly in inner city communities, some of the areas of the country which are the most deprived, where faith organisations are pretty much the only thing around, and so, you know, you have to see them as part of the landscape and the fabric of those communities that is going to help things improve and work work with that. We've seen some really great examples during the pandemic, for example, and since, of Muslim charities really stepping up in local communities and providing services that the state wasn't providing or was no longer capable of providing, because it's been kind of hollowed out and its services outsourced. You look at what's going on with food banks, which are overwhelmingly based in religious premises, you know, there are lots of communities where a faith building in a church hall or a mosque or a temple or a synagogue is the only public space. So if something's going to happen in that community, that's where it needs to happen. So I think there's a real conversation to be had about the value of faith organisations in communities, both at that grassroots level and and at scale, and how we can kind of really build that kind of cohesive, just society that we're after.
RP:
And you mentioned relationships between different faith based organisations, which is some of the work that the interspace network did. Obviously, over the past year, with the escalation of the conflict in the Middle East, there's been reported increases in antisemitism and Islamophobia in this country has that affected relationships? Do you think between different charities of different faiths and attitudes towards charities of certain faiths as well from members of the public?
PP:
Undoubtedly, and I think this is where people in these faith organisations who are kind of confident holding these conversations, well, really need to step forward and reach out and try to build bridges. We're seeing, you know, increasing polarisation again, I think in society, we saw it over the European referendum. We've seen it over some of the sort of political rhetoric, particularly in the in the Boris Johnson administration, where there was a kind of stoking of of divisions. And we're seeing it sadly in this election campaign over some issues as well. We don't solve these kind of conflicts by by going off into our own spaces and slamming the door behind us. We have to find ways to connect, to reach out to to find activities. We can get involved with in common and to not be afraid of having some pretty difficult conversations with one another. You know, I've learned a great deal in the last year about anti semitism and how that presents, and you know what that looks like today. I've learned a great deal as well about Islamophobia and how that presents, and you know how we can navigate those spaces and call those things out and say, Well, hang on a minute. Let's actually meet some real people and understand that it's not like that. You know, I think there are people on all sides of the faith landscape at the moment who are looking at the situation in Israel and Palestine and going, This needs to stop. I don't think that's a something where you know which faith you are means you're going to necessarily end up on one side or other of that. You can all agree that this needs to stop people are dying unnecessarily, and we need to find a way to to get people to a table and to work out how, you know, different communities are going to live alongside one another in the same part of the planet. And so, you know, there's a great deal of common ground there already to work with. And the moment you start ending up in a conversation which is about how you protect people from one another, how you strengthen the security, how you how you make sure those people over there never get in, the further we get from a peaceful resolution, it seems to me, so I'm really interested to See you know how, how far we can get on we've got a one day conference right on the 18th of September. Um, hopefully we scratch the surface of that a little bit more and build some relationships. Could get some people in a room together who might not otherwise have met, build some connections, find some common ground. That feels to me a really important offering at the moment, to the, you know, this part of the charity sector. Yeah,
RP:
Absolutely. And there's, yeah, there's quite a few more meaty topics that are going to be discussed on this, this conference, another one. There's a session on the intersection of faith and abuse in some more reports at various organisations over the past year. Do you think that's another important topic that will be discussed?
PP:
It's got to be faith communities have got to face up to some of the things that have been allowed to go on. Lots of those things are about accountability, really. If you let people behave in an unaccountable way, then they eventually do the thing you wish they would. And so I think the more we can surface issues like safeguarding and talk about, you know, how do we get the kind of transparent accountability frameworks that we need in faith communities, where often you've got people in a position which can feel really hard to challenge. You know? I mean, it's interesting. I'm from a faith tradition which has no kind of ordained leadership. We don't have special people who who, you know, can kind of stand in front and have their views heard without being challenged. But even in Quaker communities, there are people where it's pretty difficult to call them out, and we've seen some some things go wrong, but in traditions which have more of a kind of leadership figure in their community, then I think it's really important to have those protections in place, and that means having good practices. It means you know, common sense steps about how you check whether people are who they say they are, whether we really know about things they may have done in the past, or think concerns that may have arisen in the past. But it's also about making sure that you know if or when something does go wrong, it's easy to report it, it's easy for the community to do something about it and to get some help, and it's easy for them to support the survivors of whatever happened. And all of those are conversations that their faith communities have really been struggling with over the last few decades. The independent inquiry into child sexual abuse brought lots of this stuff into the daylight a few years ago, and we've welcomed that very much. I contributed a statement to that inquiry. It's not good enough for there to be abuse in religious settings, so it needs to be we need to understand how to stop it. We need to understand how it happens in order to do that, and we need to be upfront about the things that have gone wrong and deal with them.
RP:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah. So, so, yeah. It should be an interesting session. Just going back, you mentioned, you briefly mentioned, the Grenfell tower at. And tragedy, and also talks about how often faith organisations or their buildings are ingrained in local communities. I remember writing about after Bren fell, how you had larger secular charities like British Red Cross, who were doing really good work, but they worked with lots of smaller faith based organisations of different faiths. So that really brought out to me. So they were because they could access communities that the bigger organisations couldn't. So and they worked together, and they found new ways of working together because of the necessity of the situation.
PP:
Yeah, exactly. But not just they can access communities, but community assets as well. So if you know, if you've got a load of distressed people, you can have an organisation that knows how to help distressed people, but they still need a church hall to do it in, and someone will bring around a bag of tea bags, and, you know, make a cake and and look after people, or, you know, rally everybody around to find some furniture for the people who've got to move into an unfurnished flat because they've just been relocated. That's where local communities absolutely come into their own. It seems to me, otherwise, you're in a kind of, almost like a kind of aid agency situation, where you're helicoptering stuff in, but lots of what's needed in communities is already there. You've got the people who kind of know what's going on. They know who's who. They know how to help. They know how to access the facilities. And lots of those are going to be in faith, you know, little faith communities, very locally, to where something has happened. And we saw that with Grenfell. We saw it with the pandemic. So, you know, one of the things I think, that these kind of bigger organisations, and particularly state agencies, when they're thinking about, you know how to respond to those kinds of situations. Faith faith communities need to be on their radar so, you know, a useful source of all those things, a bunch of people who want to help, and a bunch of facilities and assets and and knowledge that's really important to supporting people.
RP:
Well, yeah, absolutely. Okay. Well, thank you very much, Paul. And that's everything I wanted to to answer. Is there any any other messages you want to send out? So anyone who might be listening to this might be considering attending the Faith Charities Forum this year?
PP:
Definitely come. I think it's going to be a really interesting day. We've got some fantastic people speaking. I go to a few charity sector events every year, and this is the one that kind of always kind of challenges me, introduces me to people I wouldn't have met somewhere else. So yeah, definitely turn up. It'd be really good to see lots of people there. I think it's it's such an important conversation we're having.
RP:
Thank you very much, Paul, thank you.
RP:
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the civil society media podcast. You can like and subscribe to the podcast and listen to all our other episodes on all major platforms. I hope you stay safe and well, and we'll speak to you again soon for another episode.
