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Commitment 4 Life

Working for global justice and wellbeing

AUC has a long and continuing focus on global peace and justice issues. Many have campaigned for, and taken part in, the Drop the Debt campaign, MakePovertyHistory, the Trade Justice movement, the anti-Trident campaign, and the anti-war in Iraq campaign; and we continue to be involved in such campaigns.

Commitment for Life ("C4L") encourages all United Reformed and Local Ecumenical Partnership churches to educate, campaign, take action, pray and give for people across the world. It works with both Christian Aid and The World Development Movement. Last year we raised over £550,000 to help alleviate the root causes of poverty. 75% goes to Christian Aid to be divided equally among the four partner countries, 10% to the World Development Movement and 15% for  administration, resources and grant giving. It is the recommended way for all United Reformed Churches to give to Christian Aid.

The 4 partner countries are: Bangladesh, Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories, Jamaica and Zimbabwe. Through this partnering and receiving regular stories and information, C4L aims to to raise awareness of our global context and our interconnected world.

 

Campaigns round-up 2011

Happy New Year! 2011 was a busy and fruitful year for Christian Aid's campaigns. Thanks to the actions of many of thousands of you, we are now several steps closer to achieving climate and tax justice. 

Thank you for all your hard work in 2011 and we look forward to campaigning with you more in 2012.

Climate justice in 2011

The year began with thousands of you calling on the World Bank to stop funding dirty fossil fuel projects and finished with calls for climate justice at the United Nations climate talks in Durban, South Africa.

We had some success with the World Bank as they revealed plans to restrict funding for coal-fired power stations in middle-income countries.

The final outcome of the UN climate talks was disappointing. However, it was largely thanks to vigorous campaigning from supporters like you that the UK and EU felt strong pressure to push for ambitious targets at the talks, and there are some glimmers of hope for the future.

Bearing Witness

We also took to the streets and on the eve of the Conservative party conference in October, we joined forces with Cafod and Tearfund for Bearing Witness - an inspiring day of campaigning and worship in Manchester. More than 1,500 campaigners came together to call on the government to live up to its pledge to be the 'greenest ever'.

Tax justice in 2011

The tax justice campaign took important steps forward in 2011 towards stopping tax dodging in poor countries.

Our campaign calling on four FTSE 100 companies to support greater tax transparency resulted in all four companies agreeing to engage in a dialogue with us, including the two that had initially declined to engage.

Our progress with IHG prompted us to suspend campaigning to this company, but our campaigning to the other three companies (Unilever, Vodafone, and TUI Travel) continues. Our recent stunts outside Unilever factories involving campaigners dressed up as giant 'tax transparency' cleaning bottles attracted considerable attention!

Last year also saw the creation of the global End Tax Haven Secrecy campaign, which now has 56 member organisations in more than 20 countries. In 2011, 40,000 people around the world signed the campaign's online message to G20 leaders; helping to ensure the G20 summit in Cannes in November took concrete steps to end tax haven secrecy.

In September, the 2,000 emails from Christian Aid campaigners to French and British ministers, managed to keep tax firmly on the G20 agenda at a critical point.  

Campaigning plans for 2012

The year ahead will see us continue the fight for both climate and tax justice.

We will be calling on the G20 to take action on both our main campaign demands for tax and climate justice at their meeting in June in Mexico. And we will continue to call on companies to support concrete measures to end tax secrecy.

Your persistence and optimism fuels the fight for justice and we look forward to working together to tackle the causes of poverty in 2012.