THE Church Commissioners hope that others will join their efforts to “repair the breach” of the transatlantic slave trade, and build their impact-investment fund to £1 billion, it was revealed on Monday.
At the start of last year, the Church Commissioners pledged £100 million to create an investment fund that would ultimately aid communities harmed by transatlantic chattel slavery (News, 10 January 2023).
This followed a process of analysing the extent to which Queen Anne’s Bounty, part of the endowment now managed by the Church Commissioners, had been invested in the slave trade.
In a press conference at Lambeth Palace Library on Monday, the Bishop of Croydon, Dr Rosemarie Mallett, said that a new report set out a “vision of bold investment in communities impacted by African chattel slavery”.
A report produced by an independent oversight group sets out recommendations for how the fund should be set up, and what it should invest in. The chief executive of the Church Commissioners, Gareth Mostyn, confirmed that the recommendations had been accepted.
The group, which was chaired by Dr Mallett, began its work in August last year. It incorporated people with a diverse range of professional backgrounds and cultural heritages (News, 24 July 2023).
The section of the report that provoked the most questions, and has generated the most headlines, relates to an ambition for the fund to grow tenfold, reaching £1 billion.
The Church Commissioners “share” this ambition, Mr Mostyn said on Monday, but their financial commitment remained the same as when it was first announced, at £100 million — although he did not rule out the prospect of further funds being allocated in the future.
One way in which the fund could grow is by recruiting partners to join in the Church Commissioners’ scheme, said one of the oversight group, Geetha Tharmaratnam, who is the chief impact investment officer for the WHO Foundation.
The social campaigner Patrick Vernon, who was also a member of the group, expressed the hope that other institutions would follow the example of the Church in making a “journey”, starting with a recognition of complicity in past wrongs, and working to repair some of the damage.
The word “reparations” was not used when the fund was announced in January 2023, and, on Monday, Dr Mallett suggested that it was too narrow a term for what the fund was hoping to achieve.
People often think of reparations as a “zero-sum game”, she said, whereas this was about “reparatory justice”. Rather than simply a payment made in an attempt to right a wrong, the Church was embarking on a deeper process from which “everybody benefits”.
“This is not about parents’ giving children sweeties when the parents feel they’ve done something wrong; this is about ensuring that the way in which we engage in the future with impacted communities will be of the now, and for the then. And so it’s working at repairing the breach of what has been done in the past,” she said.
This initial endowment from the Commissioners should be processed over five years, rather than the nine originally envisaged, the oversight group has said, and the team overseeing the fund should be incorporated, and funded, by the Commissioners, but operate with its own governance.
There was significant work to be done in working out the details of the programme, Mr Mostyn admitted, speaking with the Church Times. The oversight group had provided helpful recommendations about how the fund should operate, but it was now the job of the Commissioners to work out the detail of how to achieve it, he said.
For her part, Dr Mallett characterised the work done by the group as “a bold and hope-filled programme which seeks to bring about culture change in the work of the Church Commissioners and, concomitantly, in the Church of England”.
Asked how she hoped the fund would shape the C of E at the parish level, Dr Mallett said that she hoped some of the investments and grants would involve churches and church schools.
“I’m a simple parish priest; so I see things at the local level,” she said. She pointed out, however, that the work of racial justice did not occur just in diverse areas, such as Brixton, where she was formerly a vicar, but also in Wells, “where there are not that many people of colour”. Last year, a trail was launched which marks the city’s involvement in the slave trade (News, 20 March 2023), which Dr Mallett referred to as an example of how engagement could “help all people”.
On the subject of when the first actual investments might be made, Mr Mostyn cautiously suggested that funds could start to be deployed by the end of 2024. The goal, Dr Mallett said, was not to rush, but to “plan well for what is going to be long-term investment”.
Read more on this story in this week’s Press column