Stand Up Against Poverty!

In 2005, churches around the UK took part in the Make Poverty History campaign as part of their mission to live out love of God and neighbour.

In the autumn of 2006 the Global Month of Action took place in October - seeing campaigners in over 80 countries around the world joined together again by the white band, the symbol of the global fight to end poverty.

We called for governments to eradicate poverty, dramatically lessen inequality, and achieve the Millennium Development Goals through

• Trade justice
• A major increase in the quantity and quality of aid and financing for development
• Debt cancellation
• Public accountability, just governance and the fulfilment of human rights

On Sunday, 15th October, 2006 the 10am Family Eucharist at St. Mary's, Gillingham had this as the theme for the service and at the end we joined in the "Stand Up Against Poverty" world record attempt.

Thus we sought to combine prayer and action - bringing the issues before God and taking a symbolic action to show our concern and resolve, in solidarity with our brothers and sisters around the world and to renew our commitment to facing the challenge of loving our neighbours as ourselves. This continued at coffee time after the service: as well as the twice-monthly Traidcraft stall being present we enjoyed white-band shape cakes made including Fair Trade ingredients - sugar and bananas.

The "Stand Up Against Poverty" world record attempt was an attempt to get as many people as possible to take a symbolic "Stand" against poverty: the more people who participated, the clearer the message to governments that poverty is still an issue, and we are still concerned.

During the world record attempt in 2006, held in a 24 hour window from 11am BST on 15^th October to 11am on the 16^th, some 23.5 million people stood up against poverty.

More details about the Stand up against poverty campaign can be found here.