"What makes you feel at home?" Discussion Write Up

Ben Welby wrote up his thoughts from the morning in full at https://bm.wel.by/2024/06/07/what-makes-you-feel-at-home/

Here’s an excerpt: “Croydon Vineyard English School invited every church in Croydon (there are over 200) to a roundtable to capture and discuss what ‘welcoming well’ looks like in practice. It was a great opportunity to hear from many of the excellent organisations working to respond to those needs and I’m looking forward to seeing what God does with the seeds that were sown that morning.

The event gave me an opportunity to dust off my Post-Its. We wanted to hear from the group about everything that goes into ‘feeling at home’. So everyone got 2 Post-Its and time to reflect on the question: “If you were a stranger in a strange land, what would help you to feel at home?”

I then affinity sorted the Post-Its into 6 categories as a first pass at a ‘Framework for Feeling at Home’ (I might have left the OECD but perhaps the OECD will never leave me):

Safely and materially
Culturally
Socially
Spiritually
Purposefully
Geographically

We were mindful that only a few of us had ever been through this experience and conscious about the risk of patronising those who have. So we know that this is an incomplete picture and may be clumsy in some of its phrasing. It’s definitely a picture that would benefit from iteration and future feedback. But as a starting point I think it’s helpful for thinking about the extent to which these needs are met, or not and a route to prioritising some next steps.

I’ve embedded the (de-duplicated and summarised) groupings below (or here is the board on Miro). Please let me know what we’ve missed in the comments.