Had a good week with work. Lots of serendipitous connecting things and people together means that we now have what we hope is a very realistic big funding opportunity in front of us, which will enable us to get started with our proposed new youth centre.

We also got accredited as a Living Wage employer via and thanks to the Young Ealing Foundation. Through that connection we got two hours of free business consultancy thanks to the often-maligned-by-me Ealing Council. I wasn’t expecting much from this, but it was absolutely incredible, such a fantastic consultant! Not only did she give some very honest, useful and practical advice to develop our vision for community transformation, she also put me in touch with a couple of potentially very useful contacts.

She said I very eloquently painted a moving picture of life in Southall with it’s rich tapestry of people and cultures, it’s unique mix of all faiths and none, and it’s wealth of community resilience, resistance and defiance in the face of very real challenges from the National Front and the Special Patrol Group in the 1970s and 1980s, deep-rooted socio-economic problems of poverty, deprivation and low pay, pulling together and surviving the COVID pandemic despite chronic overcrowding and few remote-working jobs, and fifteen years of austerity politics topped off with a cost-of-living crisis under successive ConDem, Tory and Labour-in-name-only right wing neoliberal governments, and the needs of our 16,000 young people currently served by just one youth centre and struggling with the everpresent threat of lack of work and education, drugs, offending and knife crime.

At one point she asked me what my job title is, and suggested I’m working way above my pay grade. Which was nice to hear. She described me as the driving force of our project. I suggested maybe I was more rudder than anchor. She said I’m the captain of the ship!

To be honest, I felt like I’d had ten years of successful therapy in the space of three days.

She also left me with my favourite phrase of the week rightly critiquing a section of text on our new website as “ecclesiastical gobbledegook”.