News

Green Vision Group

Our Green Vision Committee is a joint committee of the two congregations. It works to help our buildings and our members to be responsible for our environment. We have already made some changes and they include: changing the light bulbs to energy saving ones, changing our urinal systems and putting blocks in the toilet cisterns (which equated to huge water bill savings), and having cavity wall insulation, draft excluding the doors and windows, choosing a new green material (called Marmoleum) to renew our corridor floor, and continuing to expand our recycling. Recently, there was a stall at the U.R.C. synod meeting to help show other churches how they can work on greening their church.

.....the next steps

An application has been made to the Church Urban Fund for a Mustard Seed Grant of up to £5000 to enable us to move towards re-roofing the Moseley Road side of the building, in order to install good insulation, six roof lights to maximize the natural light available and photo-voltaic panels which will generate electricity from solar power.

The plans for this work are being taken forward in partnership with the Jericho Foundation, who train local people in a variety of skills. It is also being supported by the Balsall Heath is Our Planet (BHIOP) initiative, which Balsall Heath Church Centre has been a part of since it began a couple of years ago. Please pray about this exciting development and continue to take any actions that you can, small or large, to reduce, re-use, recycle for the sake of God's world.

We now have a cupboard on wheels, and have moved into a new phase with Traidcraft, with a small stall every two weeks.
The cupboard will not always have the whole range, but we are getting into a regular cycle of ordering and hope we can usually met your needs.

Don't forget you can BUY NOW PAY A WEEK LATER, but if you are doing that tell us before we start adding up your shopping so that we can write an invoice for you, or do one on the computer when it's available.

Shopping at Traidcraft is the TASTIEST way of helping very poor, very hard-working farming families in countries disadvantaged by a crazy world economic system.

Although the Credit Crunch is affecting all of us, it is hitting small farmers and producers in Asia and Africa much harder. For example, farmers in the Tamil Nadu region of India have not been able to raise sufficient income to buy all the seeds they need and seeds are the very source of their future livelihood. Some of them are now forced to go back to unscrupulous money lenders from whom they had long ago escaped.

Traidcraft Exchange is trying to help but the current climate is affecting their ability to raise sufficient funds to do all that is needed and they cannot do it without our help.

PLEASE can you help: either by placing your contribution in the box on the Stall or by sending a cheque to :- Traidcraft, Public Fundraising Dept., Freepost NT972, Kingsway, Gateshead, NE11 9BR.