Conflict, faith and funding

Between July 2005 and March 2006, Community Resolve was asked to collect information from people living and working in the central city area of Easton in Bristol, about

This information was to be used to support funding bids from BME groups within the area, and to identify and design suitable ways of working between multi-faith groups to promote cross-faith understanding, and where necessary, conflict resolution. We also ran two community exhibitions celebrating Bristol’s diverse cultures and faiths, to see whether visual images could play a role in bridging language gaps.

Click here for the whole report, Conflict, Faith and Funding in Easton, or a brief summary of the report's conclusions are below.

Report summary

Local experiences of conflict The project clearly identified a number of latent tensions in the community, involving all community groups and all age groups. We were interested in people's experiences of 'hidden' conflicts (ie unreported elsewhere). Most people's concerns centred around:

Impact on health The research highlighted possible links between harassment on the streets and increased levels of domestic violence. There is evidence from other sources that continued levels of unresolved conflict and tension contribute to mental and physical ill-health, as well as causing injury when violence finally erupts.

Creating dialogue The study shows extreme views operating within our community, spanning cultural and political divides to include both far right groups harassing new populations and fundamentalist religious communities. Ways of increasing understanding between these groups – though not trying to move them from their beliefs – are worth exploring, especially as the report details how many of the tensions that people are aware of do finally develop into incidents involving the police and other bodies.

Affordable training Participants in the study confirmed that they feel unsupported in dealing with high levels of tension and aggressive behaviour, and that they would like training and support in how to deal with such situations. However, most acknowledged that as small organisations with limited (if any) budgets for training, this is hard to put in place. This confirms Community Resolve’s impression that training for community groups and individuals needs to be affordable and probably subsidised.

Organisational stability Grant makers need to be aware of conflict understanding as a key component of organisational sustainability, as high turnovers of staff in stressful positions can create instability in smaller voluntary organisations and groups. This is supported by participants’ comments about the stresses and strains in their own organisations, and limited knowledge about how to cope with them, brought about by financial hardship and understaffing.

Improving access to funding for faith groups With appropriate development, faith communities could form a platform for a longer-term investment and regeneration strategy in the local area. To achieve this, local faith groups need to work together to demonstrate potential ways and means of harnessing the faith communities’ role in the economy, and to provide examples of community involvement which could lead to large-scale funding in future years. In the survey, however, many local faith group representatives explained that their resources are already stretched supporting their own communities, and that they are unable to even build the capacity of their own organisations, let alone engage in inter or multi-faith work.

Using art to promote cohesion With this project, we wanted to work out how to take images from our local communities into health waiting rooms, leisure centres, supermarkets and schools to encourage people to discuss the ideas they provoke. This has not proved easy, as finding the right venues and thinking about security for the art work etc has posed many problems. However, we are still convinced that visual mediums are a good way to promote community cohesion, bypassing issues of language and literacy to illustrate the similarities that people share.