Westminster diocese launches £3.5m fund to help London poor

BY MARK GFIEAVES
THE ARCHDIOCESE of Westminster has launched a £3.5 million fund to help deprived and disadvantaged people in London.
The St John Southworth Fund will offer £240,000 worth of grants in leifirst year to fight causes such as homelessness and poverty and to help those who are disabled or infirm.
Cardinal Cormac MurphyO'Connor, Archbishop of Westminster, will preside at the official launch of the fund in December when the first grants are awarded.
Most of the money will be handed out in grants of a few hundred pounds and no single grant will be worth more than £10,000. Individuals are invited to apply, as well as charitable organisations and parishes.
Applications will be judged four times a year by an awards panel that consists of five diocesan officials, a London parish priest and a religious.
The fund, which is named after the 17th-century English martyr. was established in order to make more efficient use of money held by the diocese in six stand-alone legacies and trusts. It is intended to help people who live in the 33 London boroughs, an area which extends across the dioceses of Southwark and Brentwood as well as Westminster.
But a quarter of the money will be focused exclusively on the north London boroughs of Hackney, Haringey, Islington and Tower Hamlets.
This part of the fund comes from Sister Joseph Harding, who left the diocese her entire £870,000 estate. She executed a handwritten will days before her death which stipulated that all of the money be held in trust for "the black community of Hackney, Haringey, Islington and Tower Hamlets".
In January this year a judge ruled that the money must be used to benefit not just the black community but all people who need help in the three London boroughs. Auxiliary Bishop Bernard Longley of Westminster, head of the diocese's department of pastoral affairs, said: "The Catholic community already works through a wide range of organisations to help the most disadvantaged and vulnerable in London.
"The setting up of the St John Southworth Fund means that we will be able to respond flexibly and speedily to provide further funding to organisations which help homeless people, those who are deprived and children. Grants will also be available to help individuals in need."
Edmund Adamus, director of the diocese's department for pastoral affairs, came up with the idea for the fund. He explained that money from the legacies and trusts had not been used efficiently because no single department took responsibility for it.
The St John Southworth Fund, he said. aimed to reach Londoners who did not know about the trusts and who "wouldn't dream of asking for the money".
"The emphasis is on small amounts of money that will make a big difference to the people who really need it," he said.
He said he hoped that the profile of the St John Southworth Fund would attractffiliMo donations and enable the diocese to carry on giving grants for many years. He also explained that the diocese has about 15 other legacies and trusts which are not being used for the fund at the moment but which could be used in future.
The project was given added impetus earlier this year by a report that highlighted the shocking need of Catholic migrants in London.
The report, published by the Von Hugel Institute, a Catholic research centre at St Edmund's College, Cambridge, said that in some cases the Church had been "overwhelmedby the scale of the challenge.
Francis Davis, director of the institute, said the St John Southworth Fund was a "highly commendable" attempt to tackle the needs of Londoners.
"It's a national example of best practice and it's just the sort of thing that other dioceses should be watching with interest," he said. But he added that a small number of large grants were more likely to have a "long-lasting impact" than lots of little grants, as the diocese has proposed.
St John Southworth was bom in Lancashire in 1592 and trained as a priest at the English college of Douai in northern France. He was arrested and sentenced to death for professing the Catholic faith but was then deported to France. But he returned to London, and tended the sick during a plague epidemic. He was later arrested and hanged at Tyburn in 1654.
The first St John Southworth grants will be awarded on Thursday, December 13, in the Throne Room at Archbishop's House.