This made me think about what the wider story I could capture in my work instead of just documenting the workings of the foodbank system in Coventry. When I researched the different food banks in the Coventry area I was surprised how many of them were situated inside Churches, and after visiting the Willenhall and Jesus centre foodbanks the volunteers that helped run the food bank were mostly church goers.
This made me realise how important religion and the church was to charities, even the Barnabus Homeless charity which I worked with in my last unit Reflect and Research was a Christian charity.
To find this wider angle to my project, I began researching into the Church and found this January 2016 article about the decline of their attendance.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/12/church-of-england-attendance-falls-below-million-first-time
This Guardian article explains how the Church of England's weekly attendance has fallen below 1 million for the first time. The Sunday attendances have fallen to 760,000, which the Guardian comment is due to the increasing secularism and religious diversity, and the ageing profile of its worshippers. The decrease in attendance has got so bad that its fallen 12% in the past 10 years, and is below half the levels of the 1960s.
This fact that the numbers are declining so rapidly is quite scary when you remember that nearly all of the foodbank distribution points around the city of Coventry are run through Churches. This means that if their numbers continue to decline then they won't have enough support to carry on this vital service. This, as well as the reduce in government support for Charities and individual households means that while the people who need the support will increase, the people who volunteer to support may decrease, which will create a spiral of decline which is only set to get worse.