Our Story

SEARCH was started in 1999 by Rev Dave Rogers (a CofE Industrial Chaplain), Rev Steven Willey (Methodist Minister with a 'Social Responsibility brief); Susan Frost, (a lay catholic from York working for Hull CVs) and Andrew Dorton (a CofE Social Responsibility Worker) and has been engaging with churches and community organisations in the most deprived areas in Hull ever since. SEARCH is made up of a number of people who have intentionally moved to live in areas of social deprivation, seeking to be rooted members of those areas, keeping their ears close to the ground to better understand the multiple challenges facing many across Hull. 

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We organise with a flat structure, and have established processes and practices to enable this flat structure to flourish. Our work is all about coming alongside others - individuals and organisations - resourcing them so that they might be more empowered. SEARCH has therefore never sought to “empire-build” and works quietly in the background here in Hull, tending to the social soil.

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SEARCH is a charity, but this doesn’t do justice to the full, living reality of what SEARCH is, and so we now tend to describe ourselves in 3 ways simultaneously:

SEARCH is a charity resourcing churches, associated ministries and community organisations in their transformative work in deprived local areas across Hull.
SEARCH is a courageous, compassionate and creative conversation that is continuously unfolding, a conversation exploring what it means to “sow seeds of change for the common good” here in Hull.
SEARCH is a web of relationships and friendships spread across the city, a dispersed community of people exploring what it might mean to live spiritually engaged and active lives together in this time of crisis.

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Our “core values” that we commit to living and working by are:
Pray - we work from a place of rest; we contemplate; we listen deeply.
Reflect - we create spaces to think; we have courageous conversations; we share critical thinking.
Pilgrim - we walk slowly; we wander adventurously; we stay open to being interrupted.
Connect - we grow friendships; we weave webs; we bring people together.
Challenge - we pioneer; we cultivate the prophetic imagination; we promote justice.
Empower - we encourage; we come alongside; we support others to do things for themselves.

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We currently have a number of different strands to our work:

 

Living Better for Less (LBFL):
LBFL was SEARCH’s response to ‘austerity’ and involved supporting local churches and community organisations to build community gardens and allotments and delivering healthy slow-cooker cooking courses. Now LBFL is exploring agroecological urbanism and how we can support “food communities” or “landed community kitchens” here in Hull.

 

Rewilding The Church (RTC):
RTC is the umbrella term for all the work SEARCH does resourcing local churches in deprived areas, and recognises that our religious institutions, like all our other institutions, require radical re-imagining and re-visioning. We resource by providing leadership coaching, courses, and by hosting communities of practice.

 

Believe in Hull (BIH): 
BIH began in 2016 in the run-up to the Hull ‘City of Culture’ year in 2017, and gathered churches across the city to collaborate and co-create together. BIH continues to support Christians with a passion for the arts.

 

Slow Down With God (SDWG):
SDWG supports individuals in churches across Hull by opening up the ancient roots of the Christian contemplative tradition, sharing these hidden gems for a world in crisis. We provide courses to nurture deep prayer that leads to transformative action.
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Fatherness:
After one of our 'development workers' adopted four children, three with very particular needs and some ongoing severe attachment issues, SEARCH recognised the need to work with parents who are themselves dealing with damage - trauma, ACEs - but without any diagnosis, or even recognition. We work to educate agencies - principally schools but also 'children's social care'. This is very deeply engaged work.  The next phase (as yet unfunded) is to work with church/related groups to enable them to engage appropriately and effectively with local parents around these issues.   

 

Alongside these streams of work, we are also active in exploring new avenues of work, including: supporting community organising here in Hull; developing ‘new monastic’ intentional communities; and nurturing alternative approaches to education, housing and work.

 

We are passionate about justice and have a particular calling to work with some of the most marginalised communities here in Hull. We strive to be open and welcoming to individuals in all their diversity.