As explained in an earlier post, one of our Jellicoe interns has left the UK to work for the Archbishop of the Sudan. Rebecca Coleman had worked with the Parish of St John at Hackney, and during her internship the parish decided to join TELCO – the East London chapter of London Citizens.
Rebecca’s hard work is bearing fruit – as we see in this blog post from St John’s Rector, Fr Rob Wickham. Fr Rob was previously Vicar of St Mary’s, Somers Town – the parish in which Basil Jellicoe served.
About 150 people gathered at St John at Hackney Church on Monday night for the first TELCO Hackney Assembly since 2001. At this assembly, we gathered the four main Mayor candidates for Hackney, and we soughts pledges of support and partnership work from them in relation to the main campaigns of Living Wage, Strangers into Citizens and CitySafe.
In summary, all four main parties fully support The Living Wage Campaign, and have stated publicly that they will make Hackney into a Living Wage Borough in their new terms of office. This includes those employees employed by agencies on behalf of the borough.
All four parties said that they would work with TELCO on the Strangers into Citizens campaign, and they said that they would ask their respective political groups to support the pledge. The Labour candidate also stated that they would actively lobby MP’s to affect national policy. They also all said that they would work with us to look inot an Internship scheme, as proposed by TELCO.
Finally, they supported a presentation made by TELCO members from Hackney Free and Parochial School in relation to recycling, and also they would work with us as a response to the CitySafe proposal tio make all council buildings CitySafe Havens. This was following an excellent presentation made by Sandra Springer, whose son Mason presented Boris Johnson with his accolade for making City Hall the 200th Haven in London. Mason sadly died a few weeks ago. The Conservative candidate supported this proposal in its entirety.
Then, at the end, all candidates pledged their support in working with TELCO, and meeting at least every six months.
St John’s will be hosting two Jellicoe interns this summer – one from Rebecca’s college (Balliol), the other an ordinand from Ripon College, Cuddesdon.
