One of our current Mission Partners is the Anchor Project based just up the road from the Cathedral at St Clements church.
Here’s a bit about them and an invitation to join their 20th Anniversary at the end of June. They have thanked the Bradford Cathedral community for our recent donation to their work. This is a great encouragement to the staff and volunteers.
The Anchor Project is a community-based organisation that has worked in a challenging area of inner-city Bradford (ranked in the top 1% most deprived living areas in the UK), for the last eighteen years. The focus of our work is to engage with, and support some of the most marginalised, vulnerable and isolated in our neighbourhood, and to improve community wellbeing and integration.
We have three part-time staff overseeing and delivering projects and building relationships with individuals, groups and organisations in the area. We particularly work with:
• the elderly (many of whom are isolated in our community)
• asylum seekers and refugees
• those struggling to integrate due to limited English language skills
• people of different faiths and none
• local people of all ages and backgrounds, encouraging them to improve our often neglected urban surroundingsBringing diverse people groups together is important for our community which has a large majority of people of South Asian heritage, small numbers of white British and growing minorities of asylum seekers, refugees and economic migrants. We endeavour to ensure that many different groups have opportunity to socialise, learn, volunteer and achieve collectively.
Through our array of projects we help nearly 200 people every month, and over 300 individuals over the course of a year.
The last weekend in June they will be celebrating 20 years of the Anchor Project and 130 years of St Clements Church with an open afternoon on Saturday 29th June and a special service on Sunday 30th June. They have invited anyone from the Cathedral to join them in that celebration and see a bit more of what they do in BD3.