AGM and Annual Conference 2025 – Building Bridges

Saturday 25th January 2025 TCfR held its annual AGM and conference with the theme Building Bridges. It was wonderful to celebrate and thank our wonderful volunteers who helped us through out  2024. Certificates of appreciation were given to volunteers from the Blanket Bank for knitting beautiful blankets, baby cardigans and baby hats. Youth volunteers were appreciated for helping at Chat Café and general TCfR work. Lincoln Hygiene Bank volunteers were thanked for giving their time, some on a weekly basis, helping us to provide hygiene products to those suffering with the cost of living. Many were shocked to receive a certificate.

There were two speakers for the conference and both spoke on the theme Building Bridges. Natasha Ereira-Guya is a passionate advocate for connection, community, and social solidarity. As Founder and Director of Civil Society Consulting (CSC), she leads efforts to support organisations dedicated to improving health, equality, and social cohesion across the UK. In her work with local people and grassroots organisations, Natasha identified fostering connection within and between communities is at the heart of the solution to almost all the issues that CSC works on, hence she has worked with colleagues and partners to develop a national movement called 32 Steps to Togetherness. Currently pursuing a part-time PhD at Cambridge University, Natasha’s interdisciplinary mindset has been pivotal in identifying the loss of connection and community as a shared root cause of many societal challenges. Through the lens of ‘Evolutionary Psychiatry’, Natasha’s PhD research explores how cooperative child-rearing can look in the UK, with the idea that we can rebuild community and a sense of belonging, while improving perinatal mental health. Her fieldwork includes studying the social networks of UK mothers and hunter-gatherer mothers in Congo! Before CSC and Cambridge, Natasha coordinated communications for the United Nations in Rwanda and worked on WTO projects fostering cooperation between India and East Africa. She holds an MSc in Human Evolution and Behaviour, focusing on wild female chimpanzee behaviour, and has a background in Arts and Sciences, politics, and local charities. She spoke about loneliness learning training, that loneliness causes paranoia, fear and anger and vice versa. We need Hope-based leadership.

Paul Bodenham spoke about Building Bridges in relation to his work for social action within the Roman Catholic Diocese of Nottingham. In this capacity he leads Caritas in Lincolnshire and the wider East Midlands, part of Caritas Internationalis, the global humanitarian network of the Catholic Church. He is responsible for developing the Diocese's response to a wide range of social concerns, including modern slavery, environment and poverty and inequality; promoting participation of individuals, parishes and partner organisations in faith-based social action, and reflective practice and formation in Catholic social teaching.

Paul is involved in the Scampton Alliance, and then the journey from Scampton to how we can still welcome and help those coming to Lincolnshire despite Scampton not going ahead for asylum seekers. Paul asked with the Interfaith Network having its funding cut is there a way back and how can we still engage with interfaith nationally without there support?  

A poem by Philip Larking that Professor Julian Stern quoted at the Conference:

Bridge for the living 

Isolate city spread alongside water,

Posted with white towers, she keeps her face

Half turned to Europe, lonely northern daughter,

Holding through centuries her separate place. 

Behind her domes and cranes enormous skies

Of gold and shadows build; a filigree

Of wharves and wires, ricks and refineries,

Her working skyline wanders to the sea. 

In her remote three cornered hinterland

Long white flowered lanes follow the riverside.

The hills bend slowly seaward, plain gulls stand,

Sharp fox and brilliant pheasant walk, and wide 

Wind muscled wheatfields wash round villages,

Their churches half submerged in leaf. They lie

Drowned in high summer, cartways and cottages,

The soft huge haze of ash-blue sea close by. 

Snow thickened winter days are yet more still:

Farms fold in fields, their single lamps come on,

Tall church towers parley, airily audible,

Howden and Beverley, Hedon and Patrington, 

While scattered on steep seas, ice crusted ships

Like errant birds carry her loneliness,

A lighted memory no miles eclipse,

A harbour for the heart against distress. 

And now this stride into our solitude,

A swallow-fall and rise of one plain line,

A giant step for ever to include

All our dear landscape in a new design. 

The winds play on it like a harp; the song,

Sharp from the east, sun-throated from the west,

Will never to one separate shire belong,

But north and south make union manifest. 

Lost centuries of local lives that rose

And flowered to fall short where they began

Seem now to reassemble and unclose,

All resurrected in this single span, 

Reaching for the world, as our lives do,

As all lives do, reaching that we may give

The best of what we are and hold as true:

Always it is by bridges that we live.