Over the coming months we are going to take a look at who the Trustees of NECN are, their passions, their skills and what they get up to in and out of NECN.
If you would like to get more involved, feel you have passion or skills which could be useful please do get in touch. We have work streams as well as trustee opportunities.
I’m one of the older, possibly oldest of the NECN trustees and in this situation, like many others now, I find myself saying ‘I’ve been around a while’. I’ve worked for the C of E for over 30 years but I’m not and have never wanted or felt called to be vicarated. I did have to argue quite strenuously to be allowed to live on an outer-housing estate… ‘it’s a bad investment’, so I bought my own place…. so since 1994 we’ve been right on the northern edge of Hull on its outer-most estate. It’s long story but the children grew up great. There never has been a church-meeting on this 2000 house estate (a subset of a much bigger one, in name at least) that has stuck here until four years ago… we must all be reaching maturity, or something.
We created an ‘outer-estates group’ in Hull nearly 30 years ago and its one of those wells, oases – or your favourite analogy – that has kept me and I think a few changing others re-energised when the need arose. It’s a pretty flaky thing, but I have a few seminal sets of notes I love my brothers and sisters for.
Making spaces to think, to listen, to work things out a bit together – no pressure, light structures, no/low rent bosses – has been quite a lot of what it seems I’ve done over the years. I guess I’ve got one more big, employed ride around ‘what does the future hold now’ world left in me. “Stick with me baby, stick with me anyhow; things should start to get interesting right about now” as Bob would say. I hope so.