A Long Time Coming

Our blossoming relationship with L'Arche Manchester has grown from a seed planted nearly a year and a half ago by Community Leader Kevin Coogan. Having been reading through their blog www.larchemanchester.blogspot.com I stumbled across a short post about Kevin's talk to the students of Manchester Universities' Catholic Chaplaincy at the 7pm student Mass in November 2011.

I gave a talk to the student Mass on Sunday night at the Holy Name opposite the Student Union building. What a joy! Back where I studied for my degree (1988 to 1991) and what a long time ago that seems. I got a great reception from the students and we are looking to develop a bit of a partnership between ourselves and the student SVP (St Vincent de Paul) group. Since then I've also had a couple of calls from people interested in finding out about becoming an assistant in the community so watch this space! (Kevin Coogan L'Arche Manchester)

Discoveries such as these reignite my hope that the work we do is making a difference and will continue to do so. Sometimes it is easy to get caught up in the short term objectives (such as how many homeless people we feed in one night) and forget about long term objectives (relief of poverty over time). 

This shortsightedness is inevitable, I believe, when looking at our work purely from the perspective of a night-by-night basis. However, our volunteers were overjoyed to see that a man who we had referred to external agencies was no longer in his usual spot some 2-3 weeks after we referred him. Clearly by putting ourselves out there we can provide both short term and long term relief.

SVP MUSCC members with L'Arch Manchester house plant!

Kevin's post has made me realise that whilst currently work towards our ongoing Food Bank project may seem to be going frustratingly slowly, a year or more from now hopefully this seed that we have planted will have flourished in a manner similar to the SVP MUSCC / L'Arche Manchester relationship.

Bradley Taylor
President of SVP MUSCC