CREATIVECOFFEE CLUB

To the newly opened Phoenix Square Film and Digital Media Centre this morning, for CreativeCoffee Club. This is only its second meeting since relocating to its new home. I used to take part in the original CreativeCoffee Club, which met fortnightly in the Graduate Bar at De Montfort University. I missed no more than a handful of meetings there from the autumn of 2007 till summer this year. I felt that being there gave me a real boost in the early days of my post with Leicester Council of Faiths, giving me the opportunity to meet new people from a variety of backgrounds in and around the city, to hone the skills I needed to be an effective networker, and to find a variety of ways to talk about my post, my employer and myself – often to people who had no time for religion, faith or belief, and who could often be quite dismissive about it and the communities who identify with it. At the start of my time in this job, I was very much relying on resources and contacts from my earlier working life, mostly from my time in adult teaching. Since the mainstay of that teaching had been Creative Writing and the guiding figure for CreativeCoffee Club in Leicester was (and still is) Professor Sue Thomas, head of New Media at DMU, I found something of a ready-made entree for me there. Except, of course, as I kept saying around that time, Sue was teaching her students 21st century Creative Writing while I was working with ones who were largely stuck in the 18th century! Those early experiences at CreativeCoffee Club were by turns challenging, helpful and reassuring, both professionally and personally; I found new ways to describe and discuss my job, the issues surrounding it and the kind of people involved that helped people sit up and take notice, who may not have done so before. There still remains a major "disconnect" between most creative people in the faith communities and something like CreativeCoffee Club though; do the entrepreneurs, media developers, web designers, music and video producers who identify themselves strongly as Baha'i, Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, Jewish, Muslim or Sikh feel disinterested in this sort of thing, that they don't fit in or wouldn't be welcome? Things are changing, with more people at this meeting from what are called the BME (Black and Minority Ethnicity) communities than I've seen before, but it's still hardly representative.

Well, I’m keen to see how this new iteration of CreativeCoffee Club might differ from the one I was used to. Still the mystery of why the first two words are run together endures. There are mostly new people running it and new people attending. I saw photos online from the first of these new meetings and there was barely anyone I recognised. When I arrive at Phoenix Square, there are about a dozen people sitting round one big table (that’s different from the DMU days) a few minutes into a round table introduction (that’s different too). Each person is given two minutes (measured on a stopwatch on Jayne Childs’s iPhone) to speak about themselves, their work and how they heard about CreativeCoffee Club. One woman introduces herself as working with a firm of local architects who have drawn up the plans for a new Swami Narayan mandir in Catherine Street, which she says will be the biggest Hindu temple in Leicester, which is of obvious interest to me. Sarah Harrison, City Centre Director, is looking for a catchy name for the Leicester City Centre Strategy Board, which she leads. She tells us that the City Council wants to move away from talking about Leicester as being “diverse” and start calling it “cosmopolitan”. We spend some time talking about the difference between these two: some interesting nuances there (not all of them positive, in my opinion). I wonder aloud, playfully, how this sort of change might affect my job title!

Because of where I’ve sat, I am last to introduce myself. I’ve made a few notes in my trusty Moleskine notebook (it only counts as product placement if you’re getting paid to place them!) so that I can make what I have to say as relevant to the attendees as possible. The moment comes for me to speak, and the first thing I do is drop the notebook, which skites under the table! But I’ve done this so often anyway, there’s no need to kick myself for that. I make the point that long-standing involvement with CreativeCoffee Club has helped me gain a better understanding of social media, and how that’s reflected in the new website for Leicester Council of Faiths, which has links to our own Facebook page and Flickr photostream; we've now joined the fast-growing ranks of the twitterati and have an active presence in the blogosphere!

GLOBAL DIMENSION IN SCHOOLS

To the School of Education, in Fraser Noble Hall at the University of Leicester, where I’m presenting a workshop as part of a training event for PGCE primary school teachers: “Education for the 21st Century – Incorporating the Global Dimension”. The Global Dimension is an educational initiative supported by the Department for International Development, which has grown out of earlier programmes developing themes of citizenship and community cohesion in our schools. In a nutshell, it encourages children to have a wider perspective on the world in which they live and instills in schoolchildren a sense of awe and wonder at our planetary home. It is meant to be embedded across the curriculum, campus and culture of schools.

Making the Global Dimension a central part of school life means equipping children to live in a world of change, in which they will have to live with intensification of issues that earlier generations may not have had to address: climate change; biodiversity loss; air pollution; terrestrial system weakening (deforestation, desertification, agricultural overuse); poverty; inequality; debt; conflict; pandemics. These are often described as “megaproblems”; how much of this can we burden children with? Teachers and schools have to help children respond to these megaproblems in ways that are that are positive, hopeful and energising. It’s a strange thing to be doing, on a number of levels and we’re all very self-conscious of this. We’re helping train teachers who will prepare children for adult life in a world that we can barely imagine. These teachers, qualifying at the start of the second decade of the 21st century will be in charge of children who could easily be living into the start of the 22nd. Given what’s happened over the last 100 years, how can we conceive of what might take place in the next? It beggars belief and baffles the imagination. But whatever we’re passing on to the next generation, we can’t make them a gift of apathy, disinterest or fatalism. Many of the difficulties that we see bubbling up now will hit them with full force – heaven help them.

The “Global Dimension” in education has eight key concepts: global citizenship; sustainable development; human rights; interdependence; conflict resolution; social justice; diversity; values and perceptions. The workshops are designed to try and cover all these principles. The workshop I’m presenting is entitled, “The Globe on Our Doorstep”. It’s my intention to help these trainee teachers to consider ways to use the presence of faith communities in and around the city as an educational resource to help further the global dimension, presenting them as being of interest and relevance to the school and its wider "family", to show how we might discover their unity and celebrate their diversity. Other workshops on offer today:

• Developing Thinking and Enquiry Skills Through Philosophy for Children (Clare Carr)
• The Global Dimension Accessed Through the Outdoor Classroom (Claire Plumb)
• Sustainable Schools and the Global Dimension in the Classroom and Curriculum (Phil & Barbara Smith);
• Global Education Through School Linking (Helen Trilling)
• Using Play to Bring Home the Global Dimension (Paul & Alice Warwick)

There are about 120 student teachers attending. They get to pick two workshops to fill their afternoon, so we all present our one-hour session twice, to 15 of them at a time.

This is the third time I've contributed to this sort of event at the University of Leicester. Involvement in the East Midlands Network for Global Perspectives in Schools has been a constant feature from the earliest days of my post with Leicester Council of Faiths. Given the state of our world – and its possible future – it might be argued that there is no part of our children’s education that’s more important than this. But right now it looks like there will be no funding for this programme from the middle of 2010 onward. Now that can’t be right, can it?

CHURCH LEADERS UNVEIL PLANS TO TRANSFORM LEICESTER'S CATHEDRAL SQUARE

This article appears in today's Leicester Mercury:

Church leaders unveil plans to transform Leicester's cathedral square

Church leaders have unveiled plans to turn an historic area into a public square.

About £1m will be spent creating a plaza outside Leicester Cathedral – one larger than Town Hall Square, with seating for 1,000 people.

It is the first phase of a £12m plan to develop the building and the area around it, which includes the former grounds of Leicester Grammar School.

The buildings were bought by the church in March 2008.

The square will form part of the Heritage Quarter being planned by the city council.

It will include the Magazine, Jewry Wall museum and Castle Gardens.

Plans have been submitted to the Cathedrals Fabric Commission for England.

Pete Hobson, director of the project at the Diocese of Leicester, said: "It is one of the oldest areas of Leicester and it deserves attention.

"The work to the cathedral will involve flattening the mounds outside it and levelling the area to create a larger public space with greenery.

"However, it's only the first stage of the project and we are still developing it."

The commission, the body responsible for all Church of England cathedrals, will consider the plans next month.

Dean of Leicester Vivienne Faull said: "Leicester Cathedral is a little-known gem hidden away in our city.

"By developing the space in front of it in this way, we will not only be creating a safer and much more welcoming place, but also a space that can be used by both city and church for large gatherings of all sorts."

Developers have suggested a series of water features, including jets placed within the pavement and a Place Line – a memorial in the form of a pavement inlay, detailing the city's history.

All of the headstones in the area surrounding the cathedral would be removed.

However, the details would be recorded and an alternative memorial incorporated into the design.

Derek Hollingworth, vice-chairman of Leicester Civic Society, said: "It's a good idea and a step in the right direction.

"We need to conserve and restore as many parts of historic Leicester as we can.

"I knew something was in the pipeline for the historic quarter and now it's good to see someone has finally put pen to paper."

Developers said there would be the potential to create a performance stage.

The last phase of the development is expected to see the restoration of the inside of the cathedral and the development of the highways around the site.

Proposals for the former school, would see it transformed into the St Nicholas Centre.

This would house a dance studio, exhibition areas and conference halls.

VAL GETS TWO-THIRDS OF THE DAY

This morning, members of REDP's Working Group at Leicestershire Centre for Integrated Living (LCIL) to "bottom" (in Kelly's words) fundamentals about why REDP exists, its features and benefits, all of which must be presented in consistent fashion at our upcoming "involvement" meetings around the East Midlands in January and February.

After this, another meeting in LCIL, with two representatives of Voluntary Action LeicesterShire (VAL). Dee Martin from LCIL, Iris Lightfoote from The Race Equality Centre (TREC) and I meet with Michelle Skinner and Andy Foskett regarding involvement of the Voluntary and Community Sector in the management of Leicester City Council's new Children's Trust in Leicester. A preliminary paper had been circulated about a month back and the member partners of EDP had been invited to respond from a general equalities consideration as well as with regards to our specialist areas. Iris had shaped it into a coherent whole before sending it to VAL. It's clear from this meeting that issues around legitimacy of representation and related topics need to be ironed out to ensure that the right groups are involved from the beginning, rather than as an afterthought.

More stuff with VAL follows, but in the afternoon I make the short hop across Newark Street to a meeting at their place. I'm a member of an Advisory Group working on VAL's BASIS project. There are meant to be three of us involved from outside VAL itself, but at this inaugural meeting of the Advisory Group, I'm the only person attending from any external agency.

BACK TO EARTH

To Leicester City Council, Block B, New Walk (photo by Tim Hallam), where I'm presenting a paper to a meeting of the Stronger Communities Partnership. The paper is an Equality and Diversity Strategy for the Leicester Strategic Partnership, written on behalf of the Equality and Diversity Partnership (EDP). I've knocked it into its present form, but it's been a joint effort written along with Irene Kszyk, Head of Equalities at Leicester City Council, and Liz Carney, a specialist in equalities and employment law who has been working with LeicestHERday Trust. This is one aspect of EDP's "Embedding Equalities" agenda that we've been furthering for well over a year now with the Leicester Partnership.

ANTARES

It's Philosophy in Pubs (PIPS) at the Swan and Rushes, Infirmary Square this evening. The theme of our enquiry is “Exploration Unlimited” and the stimulus is a poster of Apollo 14’s LEM (which was called Antares) on the surface of the moon. I once met the man who flew that Lunar Module to the surface of the moon: Edgar D Mitchell (on the right of the photo, above). He was the sixth man to walk on the moon. I met him briefly in 1991 at an inter-faith conference in London hosted by the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University. He was one of several speakers that day. Others included John Cleese, who read from Sogyal Rinpoche's Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and managed to make us all laugh by emphasising the contrast between the view of life described in that introduction to Tibetan Buddhism and the self-centred materialism of our Western ways; Hayley Mills (who was a childhood heroine of mine, having starred in Swiss Family Robinson, the first movie I ever went to see in the cinema - at the Tivoli in Crow Road, Partick); and Clarke Peters, Master of Ceremonies, sashaying on and off stage in his white suit and white shoes (a hard look for mere mortals to carry off, but he was the very quintessence of style). He had become well known then for having written the book for the hit West End musical Five Guys Named Moe. He went on more than a decade later to star as Detective Lester Freamon in The Wire, hailed by a host of critics as the greatest ever TV show. So there were a good few people gathered there who had been, were then, or would go on to be, influential figures in my life.

During the evening programme, Edgar Mitchell popped out to have a cigarette (these were the days when you could smoke in public buildings. He was in the lobby of the conference venue smoking alone and I had gone to the loo. As a child of the space age, I ate, breathed and slept the whole space programme. I was just the right age to be swept up in it – I was nine when Apollo 11 went to the moon. Yes, lots of kids from that time were fascinated by the space race, but as an adult, it’s never left me (even very recently, when I bought a blu-ray player, the first disc I bought to watch on it was In the Shadow of the Moon, a documentary featuring interviews with virtually every surviving Apollo astronaut. I remember being in the loo, just awestruck by the fact that one of my childhood heroes was standing just outside. More than anything, I just wanted to be able to get back out there before he finished that cigarette. When I got outside, I managed to get a moment alone with him. I said the kind of thing he must have heard a thousand times (and I told him that I knew he’s have heard it a thousand times), but it didn’t matter to me right then. I had my bag with me, and in it I had a copy of a book I’d recently been working on and that had just been published, Meditations of the Blessed Beauty (a compilation about the splendour of God from the writings of Baha’u’llah). I gave him a copy, just to try and pay him back some small something for what he and his colleagues had given to my world. After Mitchell returned from the moon, he dedicated his efforts to promoting different aspects of the paranormal: ESP, remote viewing, global consciousness, UFOs and alien contact. Mitchell is a prominent supporter of the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly - which would be a first step towards a "world parliament". While I wouldn’t claim to be on message with all these, I've long found it interesting how many astronauts turn to some form of spirituality after their exploits beyond the earth.

Clare is facilitating this session of PIPS; after the meeting, she gives me the poster – that's nice of her!

REPORTING TO OUR BOARD ON INTER FAITH WEEK

I prepare a written report on our Inter Faith Week exhibition in Highcross for the meeting of the Council of Faiths Board of Directors at the Welcome Centre this evening. This is the first such meeting since a radical overhaul of our governance that was adopted at our AGM in October. I’m not required to stay for the meeting and deliver the report in person, so I distribute the paper to members as they arrive then I'm off to the Swan and Rushes for the monthly meeting of PIPS (Philosophy in Pubs).

BIG RISE IN CASES OF FORCED MARRIAGE, LEICESTERSHIRE POLICE REVEAL

This article appears in today's Leicester Mercury:

Big rise in cases of forced marriage, Leicestershire police reveal

Police are dealing with more than twice as many cases involving forced marriages as they were last year.

Officers in Leicestershire say the rise shows awareness of the issue has increased, and people have more confidence in coming forward.

The force currently has 84 cases on its system, compared to 38 this time last year.

The figures were revealed yesterday as Leicester hosted a major national conference on forced marriages and honour violence to mark the first anniversary of the introduction of Forced Marriage Protection Orders.

The law enables courts to stop forced marriages, to order people to hand over passports and reveal the whereabouts of a person thought to be at risk, and prevent someone being taken abroad.

It has been used twice by Leicestershire police since it came into force.

Detective Inspector Pete Williams said: "It is a very valuable tool for us to have. It does not involve a criminal case but it can achieve the same ends as that. It can keep someone safe and with their family.

"Not everyone wants their family to face criminal prosecution. They just don't want the marriage."

Justice Minister Bridget Prentice told the conference, at police headquarters in Enderby, how the orders had worked and what still needed to be done.

A total of 86 have been handed out nationally since November last year. The predicted number was "about 50" said the minister.

"That shows just how much this legislation was needed, and how much of a reason there was to have it," she added.

Lost in Loughborough

To Loughborough, to conduct an “Equality and Diversity Good Practice Healthcheck” with Voluntary Action Charnwood. This is one of the responsibilities I have as part of my duties in REDP’s “Mainstreaming Equality” project: to have written this healthcheck document, visit the different “voluntary action” bureaux etc in Leicestershire and Rutland to go through the questionnaire. The questionnaire would seem rather daunting in size (at some 56 pages) but it’s been designed in such a way that when participants answer a section on one of the equality strands –age (young people and old people have their own sections), disability, gender (and gender identity), race, religion or belief, sexual orientation – those answers can be taken as good for the other sections. Of course, each one of these strands has its own particular questions that don’t necessarily relate to the others (e.g. about physical access for disability issues, translation of materials in the race section). But for the most part, the questions are such that what works for one equality strand works for all. When I first went out to conduct this healthcheck, it took more than two hours. Now I’ve got it down to about 45 minutes. Just as well, really, as I mange to get lost in Loughborough and am late for my appointment at John Storer House with Neil Lambert, CEO of Voluntary Action Charnwood. When I get off the train, I decide to save time and effort by getting on the link bus that should take me to the town centre. But I don’t recognise the town centre (it’s smaller and passes by quicker than I expected) and stay on the bus all the way out to Loughborough University – and back again. Thankfully, Neil is an affable and sympathetic fellow who gives me a warm and good-humoured welcome.

IT'S IN THE GENES

This letter appears in today's Leicester Mercury:

It's in the genes

Looking at religion with, possibly, a more practical slant than the recent inter-faith week my impression is that:

Societies where a majority have a personal religious belief tend to prosper. Societies where organised religions are in charge tend to ossify. Societies where religious belief is largely absent tend to decay in an excess of personal self-indulgence.

It is said that the majority of people are "hard-wired" to believe in a deity. If so, then Darwin's theory of the "survival of the fittest genes" suggests that we should not discourage such belief. In terms of evolution, it is the most successful adaptation and the most highly evolved.

Russ Ball, Leicester