About Tyne & Wear Citizens
Posted on 04 Mar 2019 Categories: The place we want, Tyne & Wear Citizens
Tyne & Wear Citizens is a chapter of Citizens UK, a broad-based community organising organisation that seeks to build the power of civil society to act for social justice and the common good. In 2017 Tyne & Wear Citizens was launched, with 1,000 people, in Newcastle. It is an alliance of education (primary and secondary schools, as well as university departments); faiths (churches, mosques and Quakers) and the charity and community sector (children’s charities, drug and alcohol support projects, citizens advice bureaus).
Areas of work
Read the Tyne & Wear Citizens: 2018 Impact Report
Mental Health
In 2018, Tyne & Wear Citizens ran a Citizens Commission on Mental Health, a listening campaign that received over 300 testimonies about mental wellbeing across the North East. It culminated in the report Living Well: Mental Wellbeing and Public Life in the North East, which was launched at a Mental Health Assembly to over 450 citizens. The report identified common issues such as early intervention, systems and choice over treatment, and provided recommendations and proposals for much-needed change.
The Living Well report can be downloaded here.
Listen to coverage from the assembly on BBC Radio 4’s All in The Mind.
Safer Cities
Tyne & Wear Citizens have launched a series of campaigns to tackle the rise in Islamophobia, with a focus on improving safety in public spaces and on public transport.
- They held the event ‘Reclaim The Metro’ in October 2018, which aimed to highlight the impact of hate crime. A group of over 100 people, including representatives from churches, mosques, schools, the Women’s Centre and Newcastle University, met at Monument station in Newcastle – on the first day of Hate Crime Awareness Week. Here they held a rally where various Muslim women spoke of their experience of physical and verbal abuse on public transport. The group then travelled on the Metro to Whitley Bay. This event was covered on various media outlets. Read about it on the BBC and in the Newcastle Chronicle Live.
- Tyne & Wear Citizens has also won a Hate Crime Charter on Public Transport – jointly signed by Nexus, Arriva, Stagecoach & Go-North East. The charter includes a commitment to train transport staff in Hate Crime as well as a commitment to build confidence amongst communities to challenge and report hate crime.
- More than 100 people in North-East mobilised against the so-called ‘punish a Muslim day’ on 3rd April 2018, by forming a human chain around Newcastle Central Mosque.
Poverty
Tyne & Wear Citizens have a Poverty Action Group, made up of over 50 people from the region, from a wide range and diverse set of organisations. They have highlighted two major campaigns: to increase the number of Living Wage employers in the region and the Fair Change Campaign. Read more about this work in Sara Bryson’s blog.
Contact
Facebook: Tyne & Wear Citizens
Twitter: @tynewearcitizen
Website: https://www.citizensuk.org/tyne_wear
For more information please contact:
Sara Bryson: Sara.bryson@citizensuk.org
Claire Rodgerson: Claire.rodgerson@citizensuk.org
Posted on 04 Mar 2019 Categories: The place we want, Tyne & Wear Citizens