Jennifer Nadel

Founder of Living Wage Movement Paul Nicholson

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Jennifer

My hopeful story is the Reverend Paul Nicholson, who began life as a wine merchant and then became a priest and moved to Tottenham in London where he devoted himself to the service of the poorest of the poor. He commissioned research on benefits and the fact that they weren't enough to live on and he started this extraordinary campaign which was the living wage movement and persuaded London Mayor Ken Livingstone to take it up. I spoke to him the week before he died aged 87 and he was heading to Downing Street where he was going to beg sitting outside Downing Street to really experience what it was to have nothing and to sit on a pavement ignored by those who passed by. I offered to sit with him as I was quite worried about him but he refused 'I have to go alone because otherwise I won't experience what those I'm fighting for experience'. He lived an incredibly humble life in one room in Tottenham and the only thing he cared about was compassion. He ran a brilliant organisation called taxpayers against poverty, which is what it says on the tin and set up the Zacchaeus Foundation which works with homeless people and fights for the rights of benefit claimants. None of his energy was devoted to his ego, it was channelled straight into the work, he was a tuning fork for suffering and my hero.

Justice

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