Author: Hazel Southam, 22 June 2022
Churches and community groups need to provide ‘everyday support’ for people as they await help from either the health service, mental health or other government services, said Andy Burnham yesterday.
The Mayor of Greater Manchester, and former Health Secretary, was speaking at the Gather Movement Summit, whose aim is to see the transformation of Britain’s cities.
He said that Britain faced ‘a decade of really challenging recovery’ as it emerged from the pandemic and faced the cost-of-living crisis.
‘We need to get support around people who are waiting for help, who are in limbo,’ he said. ‘That’s really important. How do we lift people’s spirits every day while they wait?’ That, he said, was where everyone attending the conference, from community groups, churches and charities, could help.
Mr Burnham added that the country needed ‘unity’ and needed to recover a ‘sense of pulling together’ that had been found in the early days of the pandemic.
He called on those attending the conference to build networks in their communities to meet local needs, work with other faiths, and with politicians. Churches, charities and activists should also ‘be more ambitious’ in what they felt they could achieve locally, he said.
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