By Caro Humphries
Ordinary people can create extraordinary change.
A pensioner started a petition to the government to cap interest rates charged by payday loan sharks. The campaign was championed by high-profile members of the House of Lords and the government has been pressured into taking action to regulate the industry.
Campaigning organisation 38 degrees roused 230,000 people to protest against tax breaks for Olympic sponsors. Nine of the eleven Olympic corporate sponsors yielded to overwhelming pressure including petitions, phone calls and letters: Coca-Cola, McDonalds, EDF, Visa, GE, Omega, P&G, BMW and Adidas all agreed to waive tax relief on their Olympic profits.
Young Friends have been considering ethical investment and how we can use our money to create the world we want to see. Having raised the issue at Local and Area Meetings, London West Area Meeting has requested Meeting for Sufferings to look at the investment of BYM funds and, in particular, investment in HSBC and ways to use investment positively in support of peace and social enterprise. The request encourages the development of guidelines and principles that can be applied at all levels.
Britain Yearly Meeting 2012 encouraged us to ‘stand in the Light, pray for the emergence of a ‘good economy’, and practise our opposition to the current system: in our lives and in the deeply spiritual process of putting our money in better places’.
Are you looking for ways to put this into practice?
Westminster Meeting is hosting two workshops to discuss economic justice and areas where we want to take action:
- Individually: to ensure ethical use of our money,
- Corporately: to invest our money ethically and for the benefit of society,
- Socially: to combat economic inequality and injustice.
The workshops will take place in the Library at Westminster Meeting House
(52 St Martins Lane, London WC2N 4EA):
- Sunday 16/12/2012, 12.45pm
- Wednesday 19/12/2012, 7.45pm
They will follow Meeting for Worship (held at 6.15 pm on Wednesday and 11 am on Sunday) and refreshments. All are welcome.
Caro Humphries blogs at http://carohumphries.wordpress.com.
I am pleased about this initiative. I don’t think that consideration of these issues will ever come to an end, for instance, because companies keep buying and selling one another – making it hared to separate the good guys and bad guys – and becsuse new abuses constantly arise.
I am also pleased to know that one form of action (living wage?) will involve singing carols outside offices on Whitehall.