Tim Bissett Director Tearfund

I can remember the conversation that Yemisi and I had in Birmingham, that was quite a time. It’s interesting that the whole idea that Yemisi had for this magazine came about through the School for Social Entrepreneurs, and one of the things that I’ve been saying to her is that all this vision is terrific, but it has to hang together financially, and that’s a real challenge. Now CUF, we’re a grant giver, and we’re good at putting little bits of money into things to get them going. We’ve stopped doing this with FAM – we’re not going to do this anymore.

Yemisi knows this, this is not bad news tonight, but what we’re going to do is support her commercially now as a going concern, a social enterprise an activity that can be sustainable for the future. And what’s extraordinary now is that from a standing start there is a print run of about 10K copies of FAM. 10K superb, well-designed, well-produced colour copies. It’s hitting a database of 4000 addresses; that again is extraordinary. It’s getting out to the kinds of organizations that we want it to. It goes out to the network of black majority churches, the Salvation Army, the Pentecostal churches; it goes to the Church of England. Wherever Yemisi can get it, it goes. It’s a terrific network. And I think what you’re getting is, numbers aside, a publication that’s going to some extraordinary people. It’s going to people who really want to read about faith, their motivation and action in our communities. It’s targeted and it’s hitting an extraordinary group of people. People involved in Kingdom activity, motivated by faith to transform some of our communities. To hit people like that is just extraordinary.

These are world changers. It’s hitting people like that. So for us, to spend a bit of money and put an ad in a magazine like that is a bit of a no-brainer. So yes, we’ve given some grants, but we’re not going to do that anymore. What we are going to do is put some money in, target our advertising spend to give something to FAM magazine.

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