Quaker Social Action (150 years): Judith Moran
Judith Moran, director of Quaker Social Action, talked to the Friend about the background and work of the organisation, based in East London, which celebrated its 150th birthday this year
In October Judith Moran, director of Quaker Social Action (QSA), won the Outstanding Individual Achievement award at the 2017 Charity Times Awards. The award came just two weeks after she was highly commended in the CEO of the Year category at the Third Sector Awards.
The Outstanding Achievement Award is given to the person who has demonstrated dedication, professionalism and integrity throughout their career, and who has produced an identifiably profound effect on the sector through their work and management over at least a twenty-year period. The award was presented during the 150th birthday of Quaker Social Action.
What was the broad social and economic context, in East London, in which the Bedford Institute Association emerged?
QSA was founded in 1867 at a time when there was a groundswell of interest in poverty, fuelled by the research of Charles Booth. Booth’s assertion – radical at the time – was that the causes of poverty were involuntary, rather than as the result of innate indolence. For example, in the same year that QSA was founded, Thomas Barnardo set up a ragged school for boys in London, after a cholera epidemic in the city had created many orphans.
Could you tell me something about Peter Bedford? What qualities do you admire in him?
Peter Bedford was a Quaker silk merchant and philanthropist. What was interesting about him is that he didn’t take at face value the prevailing narrative – that those living in poverty were the architects of their own misfortune and, therefore, need not trouble the conscience of their fellow citizens. He felt troubled enough and inspired enough to engage on a practical level with the limited resources he had at his disposal.
What happened over the course of QSA’s 150-year history?
Peter Bedford died in 1864, and an association was set up by Friends in his memory in 1867. It is this association that became Quaker Social Action in 1998. There was an impressive tenacity to the work of the Bedford Institute Association (BIA) through the end of the nineteenth century and all through the twentieth century.
The times were a changing, and BIA changed with them. For much of this period the work was based in centres across East London, offering an amazingly rich array of activities for local residents. We produced a publication this year about our history and it was the sheer diversity of activities that stands out most for me; for example, running social activities like orchestras and art groups, equipping people with skills like boot repairing and toy making, training people for domestic service or supporting them to emigrate to Canada.
In the last decade our work has spread beyond our East London heartlands and now a fifth of our work takes place in other parts of the UK.
In what way do you feel the work you now do with Quaker Social Action resonates with the concerns of Peter Bedford – with the people he was drawn to helping? What are the common threads?
There is a phrase that comes to mind when answering this, which is the title of a book by Edgar Cahn, the founder of the timebank movements – ‘no more throwaway people’. My sense is that Peter Bedford simply didn’t believe that anyone’s potential should be thwarted, but that some of our fellow citizens needed assistance to move positively in that direction and that we would do what he could to offer that assistance. I think that sense of optimistic practicality runs through our work over the last 150 years.
Could you talk about some of the projects you are currently engaged in? The practical help you provide and how you address the needs you have identified?
With pleasure! I think that our charitable mission to address poverty provides us with such a wide landscape upon which to operate. Poverty isn’t just about a dearth of things that are tangible and material, but can also be about a poverty of choice, of confidence, of community, of connection. Our projects evolve and change over time, but what doesn’t change is our determination to take this bigger picture view. This gives us a remarkable freedom and – because about twenty per cent of our income comes from Friends and is usually not restricted to one project – we can act upon our insights and develop new projects to address emerging issues.
We’ve always undertaken practical work to support people in need – ranging from furniture to funerals to increasing financial confidence and covering emotional resilience and, this year, a new housing project for young adult carers. We’ve a new initiative about food which we’ll be launching next year. It’s usually the first question Friends ask me: ‘What’s QSA’s next project?’
What would you say is at the heart of your approach, as a charity, to the work that you do? Is the ‘how’ as important as the ‘what’?
Which of us would want to feel we were the recipients of charity if that meant we were supposed to be grateful or to accept being treated shoddily? If I was bereaved and bereft and needed to ring up our Down to Earth project for advice on an affordable and meaningful funeral, of course I’d want to be given correct and helpful advice, but I’d also want to be treated sensitively, with empathy and kindness. I’d say that what we do has to go hand in hand with how we do it and that our paramount concern has got to be the dignity of the people we support.
How important is listening in your approach and why?
We can’t know what someone needs if we don’t listen. Good listening immediately creates a connection. Our Homestore manager told me recently that whenever a customer comes to her with some issue to do with the furniture we have in that project, or a delivery query, or any other concern, their starting point is an expectation that they won’t be listened to or will have to battle to be heard. It is wonderful for us to be able to disarm them, in the nicest possible way, by treating them with the utmost respect and for us to go out of our way to help them.
We also can’t know if we’re meeting someone’s needs if we don’t listen and this is critically important. We won’t always get things right, or what we do may need to move with the times, so being as receptive as possible to what we’re hearing back from the people we work with means we’re going to be learning all the time. If we simply kept doing the same thing in the same way, week in week out, we’d definitely be missing a lot of opportunities.
What do you feel about the way poverty is generally represented and reported in the mass media?
I am pleased that there has been a backlash against so-called ‘poverty porn’ and that the era of the sensationalist and exploitative media representation of poverty is, more broadly, unpalatable. I feel that some of the lazy shortcuts used by sections of the media in representing people living in poverty are just not getting traction as they might have. I’m hopeful that this can be built upon and that we can applaud and encourage each other for having more compassion for our fellow citizens than the media often wants to give us credit for.
Could you talk about the way in which you feel the charity – the work you do and the way you do it – reflects the values and witness of the Quaker faith?
It is the most wonderful thing to have ‘Quaker’ in our name, indeed as the first word in our name. I feel that it stands as a statement of intent – that our social action must, should and will be guided by our Quaker values. I love that it is so overt – no hunting around in the bottom of a dusty drawer for our organisational values. They’re up there in our name, writ large.
As director, I feel a huge responsibility to be accountable for the Quaker in our name. I see this as having two main elements. Firstly, we need to be upstanding, accountable and to act with integrity – there should be something steadfast and reliable about us, as befits a 150-year-old institution. But secondly, there should also be a restlessness, a curiosity and a seeking to our work. I firmly believe that going forward, into the next 150 years, we will only thrive if our refrain is to live adventurously!
