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Latest News
Field Kitchen
The Greenbelt experience was a very different deal for Hull YFC this year. We had been asked by the Church Urban Fund if we would be willing to run the hospitality ‘cafe’ in a venue which they sponsored called the Kitchen, as part of a bigger team from Hull led by Liz Dorton. This time we weren’t just taking young people to get something out of the festival, but to help make it happen.
The Kitchen was meant to be about grass-roots conversations that could potentially lead to action, either as individuals or better still as a collective with other people who had come to share from their own experience or inexperience. The idea was to create something of the atmosphere of an ordinary home kitchen, where some of the best conversations often happen and the activist in each of us gets to put the world to rights.
The chance to share a pot of tea, join in with conversations with ordinary folk (rather than book-writing experts) around themes that matter deeply and could be best addressed collectively, in the context of warm hospitality from a ready made community of friends, sporadic sessions of singing, knitting and even small-child-running-around-inside-giant-sponge-teapot - somehow it all came together and worked. As in the best of family kitchens there were differences of opinion, stories, laughter, a few tearful eyes, times when there was a tangible sense that what was taking place or being discussed was bigger, somehow more important than the sum of its parts.
For Hull YFC as an organisation, we were grateful to be able to give back in some way to the Church Urban Fund, who have consistently supported us financially pretty much from the start.
For us as a group of young people and adults it meant that we went from being fairly passive consumers, or at best selective participants, of what Greenbelt had on offer to active creators of a hospitable, engaging, encouraging, challenging space where people could feel God’s prompting on their lives. An incredible opportunity for us and the young people we took, and an immense privilege.
Anna
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