On Thursday, people from across the archdiocese came together in support of our Shape the Change Conference.

The conference, held in partnership with Nugent and the Justice and Peace Commission, brought together parishioners and agencies involved in social action, to talk about their plans for working together better.

Now, there are plenty of worries in the world. Whether that be Climate Change, the Cost-of-Living Crisis or the Refugee Crisis, there is plenty to digest.

The first speaker of the day was Julie Kashirahamwe from Our Liverpool. She talked about how the goal for Our Liverpool was to make the city a friendly, migrant-welcome city.

To do that, Julie elaborated on the charity’s grants programme. The point of the grants is to ensure that people have access to vital services when they need them.

Up next was Dr Naomi Maynard from Feeding Liverpool. The whole point of Feeding Liverpool is to ensure everybody has access to food, no matter what their budget or location is.

She described how in certain parts of the country, there are people that do not live an accessible distance away from a supermarket.

To help combat this, they had launched a couple of initiatives. Queen of Greens being one of them. This involves working with greengrocers and the like and taking food to vulnerable areas.

As well as that, they, in conjunction with several other national charities, launched a Free School Meals for All campaign. The campaign itself got a lot of traction, even to the point where national organizations were picking the story up. It even got onto the front page of the Daily Mirror and featured on ITV news.

The final speaker of the morning was Dr Emma Gardner, Head of Environment at the Salford Diocese. She gave a talk on the environment, and what we can do to protect the earth. She made the point of the fact we are responsible, both with the actions we take, and actions we do not take.

She was also keen to stress that Environment and Social problems were not separate issues. It is in fact, one complex crisis, with both going hand in hand.

The group then split off into four different workshops. The topics were as follows, Welcoming Displaced People, Warm Spaces and Food Banks situation today and vision for the future, Care for Creation and Refugee and Asylum Policy Change.

During the lunch break, we were able to catch up with a few people to get their thoughts on the event.

Jane, who works for Citizens Advice, took a particular interest in the environmental talks, and liked that other people were of a similar mind to Citizens Advice.

“I find that particularly interesting and, for me, quite gratifying to have people who are thinking along the same lines at Citizens Advice,” she said.

“I'm working for the energy project, which is focusing on helping people within Liverpool, not only manage the energy issues here with the with the spiking costs, but also look at how they can reduce co2 emissions and how we can hit that target of net zero by 2030.

“So, I found that to be useful, and speaking to the people who you already work with in terms of attending food banks and going to drop-ins to help people out. So that's been a real highlight.”

Meanwhile, John Sims from Nugent was excited by the potential partnerships that could arise from the event and called the speeches “eye-opening.”

Meanwhile, Clodagh Dunne from the University of Liverpool said collaboration was key to ensuring nobody suffers with these issues.

I think collaboration partnership working is key," she said.

“Coming from working for a student point of view, I think they can have access to lots of support networks, Faith charity groups that they don't necessarily have.

“So, helping students or connecting students, to all these brilliant support networks will be amazing. So that the onus doesn't always fall solely on the university.”

Finally, Kathy Riley of the St Vincent de Paul organisation felt it was amazing for all the organisations to come together and help their areas.

After a half-an-hour lunch break, everyone returned to the main hall, where the author Frank Cottrell-Boyce was waiting to give a speech on storytelling, and the importance of it when talking about certain issues.

It was a speech that had people laughing, but also listening intently, hanging on every word. He talked about the importance of not being trapped by a narrative, like the police during the Hillsborough disaster, and the murder of Stephen Lawrence. He also read an excerpt from his wife’s book.

His main message was that: “Joy should be at the centre of every story we tell.”

That was followed by another activity where people were both split off into what area they had come from – whether that be Liverpool, Widnes, Ormskirk, or the Isle of Man. After that, they went off into their areas of interest and had debates around those topics. Whether that be the environment, cost of living or refugees.

The proceedings were then ended by Archbishop Malcolm McMahon OP, who summarised well, and left proceedings on a good note.