Keeping Faith In Each Other with Paulina Tamborrel (Citizens UK)

How do we bridge the gap between the world as it is and the world as we believe it should be? Can the arts help communities move through trauma to work for social change? And after a year of asking women from across communities what keeping faith means to them, how are we keeping faith ourselves in 2025?

In the last episode of this series of Keeping Faith: A How To Guide, we spoke to Community Organiser Paulina Tamborrel, Head of Migrant and Refugee Organising at Citizens UK and Trustee at arts non-profit Creating Ground. Our conversation ranged from the lasting legacy of the Summer 2024 riots, how Paulina’s own migration journey shapes her approach as an organiser and what it means to ‘keep faith’ as someone working with communities now bearing the brunt of divisive rhetoric.

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Find out more about the Coalition of Latin Americans in the UK (CLAUK) and Citizens UK's project with Kings College London

Keeping Faith: A How-To Guide is part of Women’s Interfaith Network's 2024 Keeping Faith Programme. Read more about the programme here and be the first to hear about upcoming events and ways to get involved by signing up to our newsletter. Views expressed on this podcast are the speaker’s own and may not reflect the views of Women’s Interfaith Network.

Hosted by Maeve Carlin

Produced by Maeve Carlin and Adam Brichto

Edited by Adam Brichto

Executive Produced by Lady Gilda Levy

Theme music composed by Jamie Payne

Logo and Artwork designed by Jasey Finesilver

Support from Tara Corry

Transcript

Maeve Carlin: Welcome to Keeping Faith, a how to guide, a new podcast from Women’s Interfaith Network exploring how women keep faith in ourselves, in each other, in a cause, or in religious faith so you can learn how to keep faith too. 

 I'm your host, Maeve Carlin, and today in the last episode of this series of Keeping Faith, a how to guide, we're speaking to community organiser Paulina Tamborrel, head of migrant and refugee organising at Citizens UK, and trustee at the South London arts non profit Creating Ground. 

Paulina shares with us what community organizing looks like on the ground, unpacking this term that many of us will have heard but might not fully understand, and how her own migration journey has shaped her ethos as an organizer.  Together we reflect on the lasting legacy of the summer 2024 riots, and how we can keep faith in our work with communities bearing the brunt of hate and division. 

We launched this podcast just over a year ago as part of Women's Interfaith Network's  20th Anniversary Keeping Faith Programme, bringing communities together across secular and religious divides to explore how we keep faith in the things that matter most. Our anniversary year may be coming to an end, but the Keeping Faith conversation continues.

So keep your eyes on this podcast feed and on our social media to stay updated, to hear more about our other projects at Women's Interfaith Network and find ways to get involved. But for now, let's jump into our conversation with Paulina Tamborrel.

Maeve Carlin: Well, Paulina, welcome to the podcast. 

Paulina Tamborrel: Thank you so much, Maeve. Thanks for inviting me. 

Maeve Carlin: You're so welcome. And our last conversation was a webinar WIN held in Interfaith Week, reflecting three months on from the summer 2024 far right riots, talking about how much it had shaken our communities, and highlighting what you described as this gap between the world as it is and the world as we want it to be.

So, I'd like to start by asking, how are you holding up another two months on, and has your perspective shifted at all? 

Paulina Tamborrel: Yeah, it's hard to believe that it's been two months already from that podcast and that it's been, um, you know, quite a few more months after the riots. I am holding up well. I think there's been enough work, enough conversations, enough actions of solidarity, of change making between communities, that have nourished me over the past few months.

I am increasingly aware now that the dust has begun to settle a little bit on the reality that this gap between the world and the world we want to be, this gap between communities, and between understandings of like, “why are our communities in pain and why are we blaming each other?” I think as we begin to digest that, we're increasingly realizing that this is a very deeply rooted problem. That this gap actually cuts quite deep and that the work ahead is not just to kind of mend what happened in August, but actually mend something that has been probably brewing for a really long time.

So even though I am hopeful, I'm also quite aware of the journey ahead to like build solidarity and unity and cohesion in our communities. 

Maeve Carlin: Yeah, it feels daunting at times, and especially when our members share with me that, particularly our older members, that they're still frightened when they leave their homes.

And you think, well, what needs to shift for them to feel that sense of safety again? And can you ever unknow something like that? Can you ever unknow that there are people in your community who don't want you there? I don't think you can. 

Paulina Tamborrel:No I think I'd agree. And it's, I think it's a painful thing to be confronted with.I think it was something that maybe was hidden and that it's been exacerbated. And I think that's partly why it's also so needed that our hidden solidarity and our hidden empathy and our hidden compassion towards others. It's not hidden anymore. We’ve had quite like explicit expressions of hate and anger and violence. And so we need more and more explicit expressions of, of love and unity. 

Maeve Carlin: Yes, and I think continuing to find new ways to show that, to kind of reinforce that sense of safety collectively as much as we can.

Paulina Tamborrel: Yeah. How are you holding up two months after we spoke? 

Maeve Carlin: It's hard to see it fade into the background as a thing that happened, as a past event, when I know that for many of our community at WIN it will remain a living event. It will remain a, an ongoing experience that they have and that something has been sort of radically changed for them. And I think the more that we can continue to shine a light on their experience and that that is an ongoing experience. I think it's important that we don't make it a one off because it's not a one off for them. 

Paulina Tamborrel: Yeah, no, I agree. I agree completely. 

Maeve Carlin: And also we're recording this, we should say, uh, on the week of the U. S. presidential inauguration, which we may not speak about at length because that would be a very different podcast. But I think all of these issues of the gaps between our communities feel very visceral and vivid right now. And I know a lot of people at WIN and in the communities you work with, will be scrolling through the news with a sense of real fear. So it feels very present and current, I think, in a way, doesn't it? 

Paulina Tamborrel: Yes. And I was like, wondering if we would go to, like, to the US presidential election, because it has obviously dominated, um, the news and the consciousness of many of us. But it is worrying. And obviously the, the United Kingdom and the United States are two very different. Um, countries to very different people, but we don't want to get to a point where a newly elected Prime Minister, in this case President Donald Trump, would roll their eyes at a Bishop when a Bishop says, “Mr. President, we call for your mercy for our communities, for gay, trans, and bisexual kids, you know, we call on your mercy.” And to see your president roll their eyes at that. That's not where we want to be. That's not the reflection that we want of our people. Um, so, it is worrying. Um, but a lot of space for hope. I hope. I was talking to an organizer, um, from the northeast that, you know, was at the heart of, um, not the riots, but the response. And is rooted in the communities that perhaps feel this tension the most: very disenfranchised, um, communities in the northeast that have been forgotten for generations now kind of turning to violence and hatred with the misunderstanding that actually migrants, diasporas, Muslims are the ones to blame. She kind of sits at the heart of that and it was quite electric to actually feel her concern and her anger and her drive kind of saying like, “I can see like a bigger expression of the riots happening in five years time if we don't act.” 

So I think we've got time to think about what kind of communities we want and what kind of society we want, but we very much need to, I think, start putting it into practice.

Maeve Carlin: And also, so much of that, again, is about being rooted in your local community and starting from the people you see around you and coalition building and what does that look like? And you can't do that unless you're really witnessing what's happening around you in your community, at that grassroots level.

Paulina Tamborrel: Yeah.

Maeve Carlin: You're a community organizer, we've been talking about communities, with Citizens UK, working primarily with migrant and refugee communities. I've heard you talk about this work in lots of different ways. Co creation, collective leadership, letting communities set their own agendas, or pulling up a seat at their table rather than giving them a seat at ours. Can you give a real world example from your work to help us understand what community organizing might look like in practice? 

Paulina Tamborrel: I've had some years of experience trying to explain what organizing is, not only to communities, but to friends and family. So hopefully I've gotten it down, but at the heart of it, organizing is about bringing people together to make things happen. Deciding together what would make our community, our neighbourhood, our city, our country better, um, and then making a plan to make that happen. Some are quite simple, some are quite complicated, some take two weeks, some take five years. 

But, um, to give kind of like a very real-world example, I'll take you back to South London maybe. Um, about three years ago, we were coming out of the pandemic. People were really struggling with their mental health. Our mental health providers were also struggling on like what they could do in this kind of new world of like exacerbated, um, mental illness. And we got a bunch of people together, decided that we wanted to do something around mental health.

And when I say get a bunch of people together, it's people that are rooted in their communities: head teachers that are concerned about the wellbeing of their students and their parents, faith leaders, not only the vicars and the rabbis, but also lay leaders in churches and mosques. We're talking about universities, primary schools, trade unions, parent groups. Leaders in all of their communities coming together and saying, “We need to do something about it. We're not sure what, but we can feel the pain in our communities.”

So what we did is a listening campaign, where the point of the campaign is not to create change yet, but to listen to communities, listen to what's causing pain, but also build relationships. So as you listen, maybe you start listening to issues that you didn't even imagine that you weren't aware of. So we had, for example, parents that had been waiting for their teenager to be seen by a therapist for months and were experiencing like, really high levels of anxiety. Their kid wasn't doing well. Perhaps someone that didn't have a kid didn't know that young people were suffering in this way and that their parents were suffering in this way. 

People that weren't migrants or people of colour that didn't face discrimination when walking into a hospital. They didn't know what it felt like to be a member of a diaspora community. And how the weight of the stigma but also the pain of the discrimination faced would put you off from actually seeking care that you needed. 

I'm making the story quite convoluted, but through this listening campaign, we listened to six and a half thousand people. So we trained 450 community leaders and those leaders kind of held workshops, held conversations so that we figured out like what is putting pressure on people's mental health and wellbeing. And we did those listening sessions in isolation. So parents listening, young people listening to young people, but then we also mixed. around so that solidarity could begin to emerge and like those relationships could start to flourish. 

Fast forward a few months, we did listen for quite a few months. We wanted to give people time, um, to be able to share their story and be able to listen to stories. We came up with what we thought was quite an ambitious agenda of what we wanted the mental health trusts in South London to do. And then we started having conversations with the mental health trust. Not us, as organizers, but the community leaders. Telling directly the NHS, you know, quite senior leadership what they needed and why. 

And after a lot of back and forth and kind of seeing each other's side, um, we started, um, some people would call it innovation, co creation, problem solving. But to give you an example, parents from, um, a church in Brixton, St. John's Angeltown, that had been waiting for ages and kind of left in limbo for quite a long time all of a sudden understood and could empathise with NHS staff that they were completely overstretched and overwhelmed and that there was no way that their kid could be seen sooner as things were. The NHS staff realised that actually this wait was making things worse for parents.

So after a lot of like, okay, “how do we solve this together?” as opposed to blaming each other. They came up with the virtual waiting room. So now, during waiting times, actually parents have resources they can access to. They can be referred to other services. They can see exactly how much time they'll have to wait so they can see it shrink down. And that has made a massive difference for the parents and their experience as they wait for help for their kids, whilst also recognizing that the NHS is under pressure. 

So it's like these kinds of things that actually, when you, when you talk to each other as communities, you find things to work on together. And then when you kind of talk and negotiate with decision-makers, you come up with solutions: perhaps not the solution that you first thought of but actually a solution that's going to be implemented in the real world. So it's actually very pragmatic, and it's about like changing people's lives. Not in a fairy tale, what would your ideal be?

[That's where we start. But what we actually want is for people to be happier, healthier. And that's maybe a long story of like what I think is quite like a wonderful example of people coming together and making a real difference in, in the lives of thousands of families. 

Maeve Carlin: No, it's a brilliant story. And I think it comes back to what we were saying before about that starting point of witnessing the people around you, witnessing the community you're in. What do they need? What are they experiencing? What are they feeling? And actually we don't have enough spaces as it is for that. We don't have enough opportunities for people to really hear each other. It was really beautiful hearing the mutual understanding that you know, both sides of the process were gaining. 

Also at the beginning there when you were saying getting used to explaining what community organising is, I have also felt that with interfaith, people say “what is an interfaith practitioner?”

Paulina Tamborrel: What's nutshell now? How do you describe it? 

Maeve Carlin: I often say that it's about getting people to talk to each other. Um, And that it's about coalition building and expanding people's circle of friendship so that they're exposed to people and ways of living that they wouldn't be otherwise.

But interfaith work, it's quite a slow form of activism, because actually what you're trying to do is just build the coalition in the first place, You know, are people in a room together to begin with? It's hard and it's beautiful. 

Paulina Tamborrel: Yeah, oh, it is hard. Like, the amount of tension that, that one has to like learn how to navigate. Because there's a lot of like myths there. There's a lot of stigma there. And then also, there's like some real compromise that is needed. Because the change that we need, or the change that we want, our vision of the world as it should be is so bloody wonderful that we're quite far away from it right now.

So, we have to make tough choices as coalitions on what to work on together. And when I say tough, I mean tough. Like are we going to prioritise, um, you know, the wellbeing of like teenagers right now and really like work with the NHS to like resolve that? Or should we look at the mental health or wellbeing of families with children with special needs? Like, how do you choose that? And, and I think those decisions - and it's not either or. And it was a real question that we had in that campaign, South London Listens. And we ended up progressing in a lot of ways. But there are tough choices in coalitions. I think learning how to navigate those and building enough relationships to survive those tensions, I think, is one of the many challenges, I suppose, in bringing people together. 

Maeve Carlin: Well, relationships is step one, isn't it? You have to start from the place of, of building relationships. Even just building, this kind of humanising of each other. People just seeing each other, even before there can be relationship. And sometimes even that is something that can be difficult for people, but I think the women that get involved in interfaith groups like WIN are usually naturally curious people, quite outward-looking people. But they all have ripple effects in their communities. They’re one person but they're embedded in so many different parts of their community and so they can have quite a radical impact. 

And that brings me very naturally to my next question, which is that I often talk about our WIN members as community organizers, or some of them activists, community leaders. though they probably wouldn't see themselves that way. But do you think that faith communities and faith institutions more generally have a role to play in community organising?

[00:19:07] Paulina Tamborrel: I think absolutely. It's difficult to separate the two, to be honest, because faith institutions have been such a place of Uh, bringing people together. Not only now, like we have that now, people congregate, we call them congregations for a reason. People come together in faith institutions. And they have been doing that for centuries.

And that's where community organizing is born. When people, you know, we've been talking about, like people coming together, listening to each other, recognizing each other. Faith institutions are one of the first institutions that, where people can do that, outside of your, like, friends and family. Um, that's where you start meeting people, perhaps of the same faith, but perhaps not of the same race, or the same country of origin, or education background.

Like it's a place I think a lot can happen. And currently, I mean in Citizens UK, but I know in organizing across the world really faith institutions have been an absolute pillar for - not only bringing the people together and teaching us to be, like, compassionate and kind of like have those human negotiations of living and sharing a space together - but they also help us build a picture of the world as it should be. Not that, you know, that's the only place where we get ideas of what's right and what's wrong, but they play a really crucial role in doing that.

So I think when you see, or when you experience your place of worship as a place, not only for your faith, but also as a place for solidarity and compassion towards other communities and openness and inclusivity, I think faith institutions can be like a place of radical transformation for people. 

Maeve Carlin: While you were talking, I'm thinking about so many different things that have come up over the series: all the different things a faith institution is to people, or an interfaith group, if we include that in this idea of a community of faith. You know, for our member Averil, it was a real starting point for a lot of her activism and organizing around vaccinating undocumented communities in her borough. She started looking at the people around her and that was her starting point. We have members who talk about having, you know, lectures on health issues that they wouldn't have otherwise heard about, either in their place of worship or in an interfaith group. And also when we spoke to Sandrine Tiller from Doctors Without Borders, you know, there, the faith institution, if you're on the ground doing humanitarian work, they're your key partner. Without the local faith leaders, you know nothing about the community you're trying to help. So I think, particularly in this sort of secular country, we have a very rigid idea of what a faith institution is and what a faith community is. But I think actually it can be so many different things to different people. 

Paulina Tamborrel: I mean, I was raised Catholic in Mexico, which - for those that don't know - it's quite like the predominant, uh, faith group in, in Mexico. And I wasn't really exposed to other, uh, denominations of Christianity. Not exposed to other faiths at all, really. And when I started organizing here in London and all of a sudden there was this explosion of like, not only different faiths and different communities, but also of faith institutions - including Catholic churches, you know, I'm not crossing them off - but how they put their faith into practice. Is something that is just absolutely wonderful to me. 

I remember, uh, thinking like, “Oh, maybe I'm an evangelical Christian” because one of the evangelical churches that I was working with was just so damn wonderful. Trinity Vineyard in, in Woolwich. They were a very small church, I would say about 30, 40 people. I mean, back then, I hope that they have grown, I think they have. But they were called to put their faith into practice, and one of the many, many things they did, in addition to taking action for the resettlement of refugee families, is, um, one of the pastors, Becca Bickley, she identified the need for different diaspora communities to practice English in a safe space. They were members of Greenwich Citizens. The church partnered up with a primary school and after drop off, they would just have like English club that would just be two hours of kind of English practice and conversation: Learning how to call your GP. Maybe talking about some of the stigma of going to the GP. Just Building relationships and practice English. And that was absolutely connected to Becca Bickley's faith and her role as a pastor in, in this evangelical church, Trinity Vineyard. 

And I was just like, absolutely impressed and, you know, when you see these faith institutions and what they do with their faith, it changed my understanding of what faith could be, to be honest. And I see that all over the place. 

Maeve Carlin: Yeah, I mean, we think about the response to the pandemic, you know, where mosques and gurdwaras were feeding international students who were stuck in the UK with no recourse to public funds, or no idea how to access them if they were there. And, after Grenfell, where was the disaster response started from? It was started from the local faith institutions because people know that that's where you go. That's where you start from. 

Paulina Tamborrel: Yeah. 

Maeve Carlin: You were mentioning earlier, this faith leader who was pleading with, um, the new president of the United States, President Trump, for mercy.And that's someone putting their faith into action. That's, that is faith as activism and faith as conviction and living your values in that way. 

Paulina Tamborrel: Yeah, a risky way to do that. I did see that President Trump said that it was a very bad service, but you know, the Bishop was true to herself, to her faith. But yeah, I think there's, there's a lot, um, that faith institutions already do, in terms of organizing. And I think there's so much more. I think the potential is immense. 

Maeve Carlin: Yeah, a lot of untapped potential for sure. Um, and yes, that's something we've heard from lots of amazing activist faith leaders on this podcast, and not just activists, but you know, people really embedded in their communities, doing amazing things. And I hope we get to keep hearing those stories. 

And you touched on your childhood in Mexico there, and you moved from London to Mexico nearly a decade ago. So you have this shared history of migration with the communities you work with. How does that shape your ethos or approach as an organizer?

Paulina Tamborrel: That's a really good question. One that I'm not 100 percent sure I've gotten to the bottom of, like, internally within my own awareness of myself. I'll share two ways in which it's shaped me. The first one, I'd say that when I first got to this country, I would say out loud that I did think of myself as a second class citizen and that I did think that I deserved less. And you know, like the internalized, um, discrimination is really strong. And it took me years to actually think, “oh, maybe I do deserve to have safety and security as I build a life here and not like compromise how human you feel or not put yourself on a second tier.” And I think that that's something that I, I am tested on all the time. Even as I say that now, as I was saying examples, I was like, "Oh, maybe I shouldn't say that because maybe I don't deserve it." 

But when I hear other migrants share this kind of like internalized oppression and this fear and the sense of not deserving of safety or security or protection, it sets me aflame. I hear it a lot from, particularly from women experiencing violence that, you know, that came here on a spousal visa. And I have been really, really fortunate on my migration journey. But when I hear people's journey and I see those glimpses of when people buy into the narrative that they don't deserve, because of where they come from, it changes me. So in some ways, it does shape my approach, but I think what I do has also shaped me in a really big way. 

And then I think the other thing that I would say is, I am very acutely aware of how democracy works and doesn't work, I think in both countries now, and I think the possibilities that we have in this country are greater and are safer. So I'm constantly frustrated, um, about how democracy works here. Don't get me wrong, I am frustrated, but I'm also relentlessly hopeful because I know that I can take action on a minister and I'm not going to get death threats, and I can take action on my local council, and, you know, that I'm not going to be punished. So I think also coming from places where perhaps democratic life has been threatened a little bit more, I am encouraged perhaps to be a bit bolder with the actions that we take and with how hopeful we can be. 

Maeve Carlin: That's such a powerful reflection, Paulina. I'm also so glad that you said what you did about internalised discrimination because it's something I've witnessed in refugees that I know and love. This idea of kind of, that gratitude must overwhelm all other feelings, all other experiences to the point that I've seen children talking about the things they miss from home and then caveat it with, “but you know, here is really nice too.” And you think No! Miss your home! Love your home! That is a right. And I think there is this real systemic process that happens where you're not allowed to ask for the same expectations, standards, and also feelings about existing in this country that I am allowed because I was born here. 

Paulina Tamborrel: Yeah. It happens a lot. And I think, I wouldn't just class people into two, but I do have like both experiences with people that are like, you know, migrants and refugees, or in any other campaign that I've worked on, people that experience injustice, that are just dead clear on what is needed. And are unapologetic about it. And I mean, and that's why I love working with them because they're so bold and brave and incredible. And obviously they're amazing. 

And then I also encounter a lot of people that know exactly what they need, know that they deserve it. But the fear of having that like migration status, that refugee status, and just being like, "I should be happy with my lot." Even if they know that that is wrong, there's such a sense of "will this come back and bite me? Like, will they deport me if I say this?" Um, I've, I've spoken to women that, you know, are breastfeeding and the food in hotels, in asylum hotels, is so poor that they can't breastfeed and, you know, their doctors tell them like, you're not allowed to breastfeed because it will be terrible for you, you have osteoporosis, you know, in your late twenties, and your baby's not going to get any nutrition. It's so bad and yet they don't want to make a fuss about it because what if their like refuge claim gets denied on the basis that they would like to breastfeed their child. T

There's a lot to unpack about how we can hold both: like, recognition of everything that is going well and is wonderful and is brilliant about the UK and the fact that we can see it be better. 

Maeve Carlin: Yes, everyone has the right to take up space in the country that they are living in and calling home. That should be a right and entitlement. But I've seen the migration journey take that away from people, uh, and it has really long lasting consequences. And I'm really grateful that you voiced the kind of complicated emotional side.Thank you for sharing that with us.

In 2020, you worked with King's College London, developing a partnership between the university and local communities in Lambeth and Southwark. And as part of that project, you talked about Latin American communities in the UK being known as The Invisibles. Can you say more about what that label means and the issues it poses for the community?

Paulina Tamborrel: Yeah, the invisibles, los invisibles we are called the Latin Americans and maybe people that are listening are like, “Oh, I didn't even know that there were that many Latin Americans in London” because we're quite invisible. I think it's to do with the fact that as a minority-  even though we've been particularly in cities, but in the UK for a few decades now - I guess the social mobility has been really slow. Jobs that many in my community have access to are cleaning jobs or shift work or security guards at night. And that means that, you know, people are in buses at 4 am to go clean offices before people arrive at 7 or 8 am. And then, you know, they go back home after everyone else has gone home.

So it's this sense of, you know, the invisible people that you never see but that are always there. And they're cleaning your offices, they're keeping your car parks safe, they're cleaning your streets, your buses, the tube. And of course the community is colourful and loud and joyous, but some of the conditions in which the majority of the, um, community finds themselves in kind of forces us to the edges, the very, very edges of society.

And that has meant that we are not recognized. And this not being recognized, it's not only on like public transport that you might not cross paths with a Latin American, but it's also got to do with like our presence in public life and on things as basic as ethnicity monitoring. Like we are a seventh of the world and yet we don't have a box.

And when this issue first came to me, um, it was three young Latin American women. And they were like, "we want a box in the UCAS application system to get into university." And at first I was like, "Guys, we're tackling gender violence here. We're tackling housing, a form, like really? Come on!" Obviously I couldn't have been more wrong, and they set me straight in like 30 seconds.

Because it turns out that if you're not on the form, you basically don't exist for the system. We're not on the census. Um, so we're not tracked, our health is not tracked, our education isn't tracked, social mobility isn't tracked, our housing needs aren't tracked. So, we basically have this growing community of Latin Americans with needs, with talents, with possibilities, but because we're not recognized by the Organization of National Statistics, then we're not recognized anywhere because everyone follows the Organization of National Statistics. 

And we did have an ongoing campaign to get different organizations to recognize Latin Americans. There's a coalition of Latin American organizations called CLAUC that has done really great work on it. The Latin American Chaplaincy, talking about the role of faith institutions, has done great work. But it's a challenge faced, to be honest, not only by Latin Americans, but by a lot of minorities that are just kind of not recognized by the powers that be and that shape our lives every day.

Maeve Carlin: I've heard friends, I remember growing up, talking about the experience of not having a box to tick, and that that was something that they really internalized. I'm thinking of like Arab British communities. It felt like almost like you don't count. It's such an important issue to highlight and it's one that I think we don't think about enough and talk about enough. 

Paulina Tamborrel: And it's one of those things that, um, I mean to my shame, because I get very easily angry about injustice. This was not an injustice I was angry about, which also comes from privilege a little bit, maybe. I wasn't particularly angry about it because I just accepted it. Like, I'll just tick other, whatever is fine. 

And then when you start getting into these circles and these conversations, actually you realise like, “You know what? Maybe I do deserve a box. And you know what? Maybe it would be helpful. to be able to have translators when I have a medical appointment. And you know what? Maybe it would be helpful if Latin American artists could also apply for funding or if like bursaries to get into higher education recognise that Latin Americans also live in poverty and might deserve social mobility schemes.

All of these possibilities start to unlock when you talk to other people, because having a box wasn't on my "world as it should be" list, but it should have been, and it is now. But you only mark that when you talk to others. 

Maeve Carlin: Yeah, maybe the list is constantly evolving through that witnessing and listening that we were talking about.

Paulina Tamborrel: Yeah, yeah. 

Maeve Carlin: Well, speaking of really special coalitions of migrant women in London. You're on the board of Creating Ground, which is an organisation that we've partnered with before at WIN: a community of migrant women in South London using the arts to call for social change. And I wonder if you could share from your experience with Creating Ground how the arts can be used as tools for activism and community organising.

Paulina Tamborrel: I mean I first got involved with Creating Ground. They have always been, like, an arts and wellbeing based organisation. And they kind of wanted to do community organising very much rooted in that arts tradition and creative tradition. So it was a challenge for me. It was a first, even though I think I'm quite creative. But on my first session, um, Mama Felicia, this like, incredible pillar in the community. 

Maeve Carlin: I think I've met her. 

Paulina Tamborrel: Have you? Of course you have. She's an absolute legend. I had my whole like, session planned of like, “What is power? How do we build power and like, community power?

Um, and she stopped me and kind of said like, "In this space, we start with a song, like, have you lost your mind? Like, we've not sung yet, we can't begin." 

Maeve Carlin: I've definitely met her. Yeah, yeah. 

Paulina Tamborrel: I think that was like the beginning of a journey for me to discover actually how powerful, like, the arts and creativity could be.

In Creating Ground, I kind of see it injecting joy in what could be a very joyless space. Migrant and refugee women and the women that are part of creating ground experience a lot of hardship from a lot of fronts. And I think what the arts and this kind of focus on creativity does is that it makes something that could seem unthinkable to think like, let's sit down and think about our pain and our trauma, which would be like, why would someone ever want to do that? Like, that is such a hard ask. It becomes a workshop of creativity, of discovery. I think it gives people an outlet when you're doing listening sessions or storytelling sessions to be able to set their own pace. When you're working with your hands or with your body, I think it allows people to maybe be a little bit in touch with how much they want to share and how much they want to hold back, which I think makes the organizing space a lot healthier. Because what can happen, and I don't think it happens a lot, um, within Citizens UK, but it can happen in activism spaces, it can become quite traumatic to be talking about the injustice that you experience every day. And I think what art and creativity does is that it gives it a layer of safeguarding. And a thick, thick layer of joy. 

And the final bit that I'll say on this art point, um, is that I also think it acts a little bit like an equalizer. Particularly in communities where people have very different experiences. When we try to shift away from, like, identity politics, for example, and we want to build kind of like a sense of collective identity, I think having something that you all work on together, it sounds quite simplistic but I think it's the beginning of something greater.

I'll just give you a brief example with Creating Ground. When we were first trying to figure out what they wanted to change. We had gone through all of this leadership training, they knew how to create change and now they needed to decide what to create change on. And we got a little bit stuck for like two months. We basically couldn't really decide because we opened one box on, for example, no recourse to public funds. And then there would be such like an explosion of feelings and trauma, it'd be quite difficult to then move to strategy. The next session, we'd talk about temporary accommodation and it would be really difficult to like move from such pain into what is, “What are the milestones that we need to hit? What are the actions that we need to take?” 

Eventually we came back to the arts and having more creative workshops on where we wanted to go led to us realizing that they wanted to work more on temporary accommodations and notice periods. So that people would be given notice. And, you know, sometimes they get told “You're moving today. You don't pick up your keys today, you lose your house.” Um, and, you know, got a lot of single moms and things like that, that they just couldn't cope with the council. And then the council would threaten like class them as voluntarily homeless.

Anyway, they've done fantastic work on that, and they've won campaigns on that. They've got the council to give Wi Fi to everyone in temporary accommodation. So it's been very successful, but I think the art allows people to move through the pain into a space of action. 

Maeve Carlin: Wow, that's, I mean, they're such an amazing organisation. We'll obviously link to them in the show notes so that people can support their work. 

Well, we're coming to the end of our conversation, and when we spoke about the riots at our webinar in November, you talked about taking it personally, about the pit in your stomach when you know that the communities you work with and people you care about are so directly affected. I think most of us in the charity sector can relate to that pit in your stomach in one way or another. So I'm asking for all of us and for myself, how do you keep faith? How do you keep doing this work when it feels so personal?

Paulina Tamborrel: Oh! Um, it's hard sometimes. It's hard sometimes to, like, not want to just crawl under your bed and just pretend that everything is okay. I think the short answer is that we cannot do it alone. When I'm down, I need to be with people that aren't down. When others are down, I need to be the one that's, like, energized and hopeful. And I think feeding on each other and relying on each other to keep faith is, like, absolute key. Because otherwise it just, the darkness of it and the weight of it can, can creep in.

On a very, like, practical note, I talk to people all the time. Um, and some people are, uh, very hopeful and they inject me with hope, and other people are very angry and they inject me with anger, and other people perhaps are a bit low and, and ground me a little bit. But not going at it alone, I'd say, is the biggest thing. 

And I think the second thing that I come back to into like why I do this kind of work of bringing people together is that I just don't think there's another way.If I entertain the thought of like, “Let's antagonize the other.” It just gets worse. And, and I think the reality of like, if we're going to resist the current of like hatred, and dehumanising each other and othering each other, I think we need to start with like, us not dehumanising others. And we do that by talking to them. 

So talking to people, all sorts of people, I think is how I keep faith.

Maeve Carlin: Yes, let's keep talking. Let's keep faith together. I think that's the only way, sometimes. Thank you so much, Paulina. 

Paulina Tamborrel: Thank you so much, Maeve. Thanks for having me. 

Maeve Carlin: We are so grateful to Paulina for reflecting with us and restoring our faith in the world as it should and maybe still could be. You can find out more about Paulina's work and the amazing organisations we've discussed today via the links in our show notes. 

We also want to extend a huge thank you to all of you listening for keeping faith with us throughout this series, for staying curious and perhaps even challenging your own preconceptions around faith and interfaith.  We will be keeping this conversation going both on the podcast feed and in our wider work at Women's Interfaith Network, with some big updates coming later this year. So make sure you're subscribed wherever you're listening and on our social media channels. If this series has resonated with you so far, we'd love to hear from you in a review on your favorite podcast platform. As always, until next time, keep faith.

Keeping Faith: A How-To Guide was created by Women’s Interfaith Network. The podcast is co-produced by me, Maeve Carlin, and Adam Brichto. Our executive producer is Lady Gilda Levy. Theme music was composed by Jamie Payne and our logo was designed by Jasey Finesilver. Additional Support from Tara Corry.