Tyne & Wear Citizens

#theplacewewant

A key finding of Rethinking Poverty is that we need to ‘go local’ if we want to eliminate poverty. There is an upsurge of people coming together to work out what sort of society they want, and to set about trying to achieve it. This is what #thehullwewant is doing in Hull. This is what Tyne & Wear Citizens is doing. Here we feature efforts to create #theplacewewant.

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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).

*The Tyne & Wear Citizens launch assembly, which was held at the Tyne Theatre and attracted over 1000 attendees*

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 a ‘Reclaim The Metro’ event 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 and Go-North East. The charter includes a commitment to train transport staff in Hate Crime as well as a commitment to build confidence among communities to challenge and report hate crime.
More than 100 people in the North East mobilised against the so-called ‘punish a Muslim day’ on 3 April 2018 by forming a human chain around Newcastle Central Mosque.

Poverty

Tyne & Wear Citizens has 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: [email protected]
Claire Rodgerson: [email protected]