The St James Advice and Community Centre is in danger of closing down. It has been in existence for 33 years and provided a great service to the migrant communities of Aston, mostly on issues of immigration and social benefits.
It all started very simple. The local vicar of the Church Of England was asked by recently arrived migrants to help out with their paper work. He did so with the help of a young man from Bangladesh who later studied law and became the director of the Centre. So from the beginning the Centre not only involved the Church of England but representatives from the migrant communities themselves. This is still very much the case, both with respect to the staff of the Centre and the Management Team. The Centre in its very heart reaches across ethnicity and across religion.
The reason for the imminent closure is the Birmingham City Council, the main sponsor of the St James Advice and Community Centre and of many other similar centres across the city. Times are bad and spending cuts of 20% or more were expected, but what was not expected was the interruption of subsidies altogether. Last December the City Council announced formally that its funding will stop by the end of March. It allows reapplication by July but for the intervening period the advice centres are on their own. What this means in fact is that the smaller centres with less financial capacity are forced to stop operations and lay off their workers. This is exactly what the St James Advice and Community Centre did: it sent redundancy notices to its seven staff.
It did more than this. It also collected 500 signatures of local residents who protested the way the City Council had made its funding decision and it involved the Birmingham Mail to put pressure on local politicians. One problem is that Aston is Labour territory, whereas the councillor and cabinet member for local services is Lib Dem. Political strife may be involved in another way as well: one of the two Labour councillors in the area is the former director of the St James Advice and Community Centre who built his reputation by his long-standing service in the Centre.
Attempts are on their way to continue the advice service on a voluntary basis, at least until the time that reapplication for funding can be made. But there is a hitch or two: Funding in the future may not be on the basis of an individual advice centre but only when they are grouped in clusters. What is more, advice centres should move away from face-to-face meetings with their clients and operate mainly via the internet and telephone connections. This would be disastrous for Aston: whether the Council likes it or not, migrant communities function mostly on the basis of face-to-face encounters.
Ton
