The Bishop has launched Tearfund’s new report and campaign, Ordinary Heroes.

The Ordinary Heroes campaign aims to encourage people to make small but significant changes in their lifestyles.  As well as calling for policy change, the campaign seeks to encourage a grassroots movement of people to take responsibility for bringing about change. A copy of the full report can be found here

Ahead of the launch, a letter from the Bishop of London appeared in The Times endorsing the report and calling for change. You will find the full text of the letter below.

Sir,

Many of today’s global challenges have been brewing for many years and we should have seen them coming. Yet we have made the mistake of concentrating only on short-term issues.

We can reasonably predict that the floods, droughts and storms already ravaging countries and wiping out families will only get worse. For many of the world’s poorest people, those threats are already a daily reality.

We must respond to natural resource constraints by living within our fair share of the world’s environmental limits. We must meet poverty with radical generosity and use our power as citizens and consumers to demand that all people are treated with dignity, wherever they are.

Often, only crises produce real change. But actions taken at moments of crisis depend on the ideas to hand.

We need bigger ideas: a passionate concern for the common good and a fuller life for everyone, whoever they are and wherever they live — both now and in future generations.

Tonight I will launch a campaign by the anti-poverty charity Tearfund calling for a restorative economy, based on a movement of people willing to change their own lives so that everyone can share in an equitable global prosperity.

The Rt Revd & Rt Hon Richard Chartres, Bishop of London