Near Neighbours aims to bring together people in diverse neighbourhoods ? including atheists
The Church of England has secured �5m of government funding to promote community cohesion through activities such as breadmaking and inter-faith music groups. Near Neighbours is a three-year project which, according to its website, "aims to bring people together in diverse communities, helping them build relationships and collaborate to improve the local community they live in". Grants of between �250 and �5,000 are available to anyone ? including atheists ? as long as the proposed activity encourages the involvement of "local people from different faiths and none".
Examples of such activities are women of different faiths baking bread together and community music groups for youths to reduce the risk of involvement in street crime.
"Separation can lead to misunderstanding and a lack of trust or respect for each other, which is not healthy for a local community," says the website.
The Church Urban Fund, a Church of England charity set up in 1987, will manage the Near Neighbours project. It will focus on four areas: Birmingham, Bradford, Leicester and east London.
Communities secretary Eric Pickles said religious organisations played an "enormous pastoral role" in neighbourhoods and enjoyed "excellent" community networks. The Church of England had been "getting on with their work for centuries ? offering support to youth groups, parents and pensioners, and providing services to those in need".
He said: "There are very few faith groups that don't look beyond their own faith and congregation to put something back into the community that surrounds them, so this project will build on that and I encourage people to get involved."
Last November, when the church announced it was seeking �5m from the Department for Communities and Local Government, one of its officials claimed Near Neighbours would make more of a difference to community cohesion than the state's �61m counter-extremism strategy.
William Fittall said: "I think this is seen as one of the ways of moving forward perhaps in a slightly more constructive way than the previous government's Prevent agenda."
While the Church of England was not offering Near Neighbours as a replacement for Prevent, the project was "worthwhile in its own right". He added: "We know the last government had reservations about whether the [Prevent] programme worked."
A Near Neighbours briefing document, published last year, said there were "significant separations between communities, including religious communities".
"Much cohesion activity in recent years has not impacted at street level and has been delivered by organisations which are external to the local context."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/feb/20/church-of-england-community-cohesion
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