A Fresh Vision

When I was in Sri Lanka in April this year, I had quite a lot of time to myself to prayfully consider my own future, and the future of Kingscare/karuna Action. I decided that it was the correct time to lay down my responsibility for running the charity on a day-to-day basis and handover control to Simon and Jessica Hannington.

The trustees excepted my recommendation to appoint Simon as a director of karuna Action. I am not retiring! I will continue to work in the office for one or two days a week as an adviser or consultant to the rest of the team and to the trustees.

In my previous blog I said that I needed a new vision for the future. My vision has always been the end of extreme poverty – and that hasn’t changed! What I really needed was a fresh vision. Or to put it a better way I needed my vision refreshed. The way my vision was implemented was the formation of a charity. That has been achieved. In handing over responsibility of the charity to others, the vision needed being refreshed, particularly as to how to implement it.

A fresh, or a refreshed vision

When I was running the charity as director, I was so caught up in the details that I had very little time to consider how I, as a person, could raise the awareness of the evils of extreme poverty.

Sitting quietly at Kit and Maggie’s house in Sri Lanka, two things became clear to me. The first involved laying aside the everyday running of Kingscare/karuna Action. The second thing was to go back to the original vision to seek ways to inspire other people to feel as passionately as I do about the elimination of poverty.

A fresh approach

I now aim to spend most of my time communicating with people. Much of this, will be in written form, such as this blog. I’m not an academic or an expert, but I do have a grasp of world affairs. I aim to communicate with ordinary people, meeting with them at their own level.

In the 21st-century, we have many tools available to us to communicate. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, e-mails, text messages, instant messaging etc are ideal ways to communicate in the modern world. The traditional way, would have been to write a book. That is a possibility in the future, but right now, writing a blog and publicising it on Facebook, seems to be the right way forward.

I aim to write about things such as:

• compassion
• Justice
• Poverty
• Giving

I still feel passionately about the original vision of eliminating extreme poverty. That vision remains. But what I really needed was a fresh approach to the way that vision could be implemented. Hence this blog …