BLACK-LED businesses focusing on education, economic empowerment, health outcomes and projects aimed at improving access to land and food are to be the beneficiaries of a £100 million fund aimed at addressing the Church of England’s role in the Transatlantic slave trade.
A new impact investment fund called the Fund for Healing, Repair and Justice will invest the money following recommendations in a report from the Church Commissioners, the financial arm of the Church of England.
The report, released today (March 4) followed an announcement last year by the Church Commissioners that the fund was aimed at trying “to address past wrongs” linked with the slave trade.
The recommendations have been written by an independent Oversight Group chaired by the Bishop of Croydon, the Rev Dr Rosemarie Mallett and which had a majority of members from the impacted communities.
The Oversight Group has also recommended that the fund should be ultimately owned and run by Black communities, with the aim of starting later in 2024.
The creation of the Fund is the most significant act of acknowledgement and repair yet made by any UK institution that was in receipt of funds earned through the enslavement of African people and their descendants.
However, it also acknowledges that the “£100m initially earmarked by the Church Commissioners is not enough, relative to the scale of the Church Commissioners’ endowment or of the moral sin and crime of African chattel enslavement.”
The report says: “Crimes against humanity rooted in African chattel enslavement have caused damage so vast it will require patient effort spanning generations to address. But we can start today, in small and large ways.”
The report also recommended that the organisation, in partnership with others, should target an initiative of £1bn and above.
Dr Mallett said: “No amount of money can fully atone for or fully redress the centuries long impact of African chattel enslavement, the effects of which are still felt around the world today. But implementing the recommendations will show the commitment of the Church Commissioners to supporting the process of healing, repair and justice for all of those across society impacted by the legacy of African chattel enslavement.”
She continued: “This work and the Fund matter because the legacy of African enslavement continues to have a significant impact on communities today and inequalities persist till this day.
“The impact is measurable and apparent in everything from pregnancy and childbirth outcomes to life chances at birth, physical and mental health, education, employment, income, property, and the criminal justice system. We hope this initiative is just the start and is a catalyst to encourage other institutions to investigate their past and make a better future for impacted communities.”
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Some of the Archbishop’s £100m, from profits made from the Anglican Churches investment from transporting African slaves to the Caribbean, and the Americas for over a century, must be used to create a Parliamentary Lobby; specifically for His Majesty’s African-heritage men, women, and youth.
The disparity, and absence of a Treasury Funded Parliamentary Lobby for His Majesty’s African-heritage people, allowed the unopposed persecution, and then illegal exiling of Caribbean Subjects of senior years, by the Home Office in 2018.
Consider the Treasury disparity of funding for African, and African-Caribbean people, Voice readers, in the light of His Majesty’s February announcement of £54m for security of Jewish communities, responding to their claims of prejudice, resulting with the grand total of £72m to Jewish schools, synagogues, and other community centres to help England’s ethnic Caucasian-Jewish people provide extra security.
Stonewall annually receives from the tresury, £600,000: with statutory assistance to influence England’s corporate and public institutions.
The stark Treasury disparity of funding against England’s African-heritage Subjects, is only matched by Sir Kier Starmer’s awful treatment of Labour’s African-skinned MPs and Elected Councillors, typified by Labour’s treatment of Rt Hon Diane Abbott MP, and the Rt Hon Kate Osamor MP.