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SCoJeC's Government Funding Renewed |
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6 July 2017 |
SCoJeC's grant from the Scottish Government's "Promoting Equality and Cohesion Fund" has been renewed for the year from July 2017 to June 2018, for our project entitled "Empowering, Engaging, and Connecting Diverse Communities" and the Government has also indicated that it "is minded" to provide the same funding for the subsequent two years. This is the ninth successive year that SCoJeC has benefitted from the Scottish Government's funding for equality and community cohesion, although there has been a small reduction in the grant after four years of increase.
The continuation of our funding is recognition of the various needs that we identified through our Being Jewish in Scotland project, and also of the need to improve the confidence and resilience of the Community in light of the worrying negativity documented by our follow-up study of What's changed about Being Jewish in Scotland (both funded by the Scottish Government's Community Safety Unit).
The objectives of the Government's equality funding are "to reduce discrimination, tackle hate crime, promote community cohesion, and increase community representation", and this award recognises the contribution that SCoJeC's work makes to all these objectives. As our Annual Report to the recent AGM explains, our work has four main strands:
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Representing the interests of the Community to the Scottish Government, politicians, the public and voluntary sector, and other communities, about matters that affect Jewish people in Scotland.
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Advancing Public Understanding by responding to general enquiries; promoting accurate, authoritative, and engaging educational materials about Jews, Judaism, and the Jewish Community; and maintaining our much commended website as a key source of information.
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Community Development – providing a support network for the smaller Jewish communities and potentially vulnerable Jewish people; publishing Four Corners; arranging events throughout Scotland; and helping people to report antisemitic hate crime.
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Community Empowerment – helping the Jewish Community and other minority communities to engage in civic society by publishing regular digests of information about policy matters, including MEMO, a weekly digest of current information; and assisting Scottish communal organisations to comply with Child Protection, visa, and other regulations.
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Our proposal for the coming year also includes some joint working with the Glasgow Jewish Representative Council as well as with Jewish Student Chaplaincy (Scotland).
SCoJeC Director Ephraim Borowski said: "We are delighted that the Scottish Government continues to recognise the importance of the contribution SCoJeC makes – both within and on behalf of the Jewish Community – to its objectives of combatting hatred and discrimination and making communities stronger, safer, and better integrated. This demonstrates the value they place on the empirical evidence that we were able to gather, thanks to their previous support, about people's real experience of "Being Jewish in Scotland", as well as our record of consistently delivering on our commitments.
"Together with the very generous funding we receive from communal Trusts, and in particular the Glasgow Jewish Community Trust, the Netherlee and Clarkston Trust, and the Pears Foundation, this award from the Scottish Government will enable us to continue our vital work to support Jewish people and Jewish life in Scotland."
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