By Lianne Kolirin
The Rev Steve Chalke has two milestones to celebrate this year — his 70th birthday and the 40th anniversary of the charity he set up with his wife Cornelia.
The birthday party will be later this year. But on Tuesday this week, dignitaries, supporters and beneficiaries will gather at Westminster for a parliamentary reception in celebration of the Oasis Charity Trust, a “community movement” that has changed many thousands of lives in the UK and overseas.
Under its massive social care umbrella, the organisation runs schools, youth clubs, housing projects, food banks and a youth offenders’ school, while also offering advice and support on issues ranging from mental health to the LGBTQI+ community.
It aims to end disadvantage and create opportunity and has done so with tremendous success. It operates in more than 50 communities and runs the Oasis Academy Trust of 54 schools.
It is a social welfare powerhouse that grew from the humblest of beginnings. In an interview with the Religion Media Centre, Mr Chalke recalled: “I failed the 11-plus and I went to a dump of a secondary school. All they really taught us was that we weren’t intelligent enough to go to a grammar school, so I had this sense that I would always work with my hands not my head.”
While there was little to hold his interest at school, he was drawn to a Baptist church in South Norwood, south London, where he grew up, but not for spiritual reasons.
“I started going to this Friday night youth club because there was a girl there that I fancied,” he recalled of his 14-year-old self. “I went every week for ages because she was beautiful and then one Friday night her friend told me that she thought I was ugly and wouldn’t go out with me.”
He left, crestfallen, and embarrassed, determined never to go back. But on his short walk home came a revelation that would change his life.
“I thought, ‘Hang on a minute, the story they tell you at that youth club is a lot better than the story they tell me at my school.’ At my school they tell me my life has no purpose or meaning. Down at the youth club they tell me that I’m made by God and my life has got purpose and, even if I never find it, I’m unique.
“So I remember thinking on the way home, ‘I’m going to believe the church’s story, not the school’s story’.” Undeterred, he made a commitment to return. “Then I realised that if I was going to go back to the youth club, in for a penny, in for a pound, I’d be a Christian, and if I was going to be a Christian I ought to become a church leader.”
In addition, he promised himself that he would one day “set up a school that’s worth going to”, as well as a home for disadvantaged children and a hospital.
“By the time I got home from the youth club I knew what to do with my entire life and that was a gift from God.” That sense of purpose has “acted as my compass”, he said. “Oasis is the outcome of that — it changed my whole attitude to life.”
After leaving school, he spent several years working and volunteering as a youth worker — but always with that vision at the back of his mind. In 1981 he graduated from Spurgeon’s College in south London and was ordained a Baptist minister. He spent four years working at Tonbridge Baptist Church, in Kent, before eventually convincing his wife that he had to quit to follow his dream.
“Cornelia had the same kind of education as me so she said, ‘We’ll have to start with the house because we’re not intelligent enough to start a school and we certainly can’t start a hospital’,” Mr Chalke recalled.
Soon afterwards he was contacted by the son and daughter-in-law of the late Baptist minister Graham Scroggie. They had been running a hostel for young homeless people and were inspired to get in touch after hearing him speak. To Mr Chalke’s amazement, they offered him the hostel building in Croydon, as well as some generous funding. But he declined, explaining that he was determined to set up in “the inner city where the real need was”.
The story did not end there, however. The Scroggies were so impressed with his determination that they sold the hostel building and donated the proceeds so the Chalkes could buy a property in Peckham.
“We managed to buy this house and completely do it up and though it looks like an ordinary two-up two-down, it has 16 bedrooms,” he said, explaining that that first housing project — which still operates — was set up to support young and vulnerable women who they “help into a new life”.
“As we got started Cornelia said to me, ‘What we’re doing here at this house is providing a kind of oasis for people.’ So that’s how Oasis got its name.”
His teenage vision has been realised many times over in terms of housing and education, with plans for more constantly growing. And the healthcare vision also came to fruition, when during the 1990s Oasis built a hospital in the Latur district of Maharashtra in India where an earthquake destroyed 50 villages and killed nearly 10,000 people.
Today, the charity takes a more holistic approach to health, incorporating elements into much of its wider work. This is the charity’s overall strategy, Mr Chalke explained. “My critique of our social services and welfare system is that sometimes it unwittingly supports people in their poverty, from generation to generation. It doesn’t lift them out of it,” he said.
“We developed an integrated and holistic approach, a wraparound support system that was about education as well as housing, that was about healthcare — mental as well as physical — but that it was also about that inner journey. That sense of purpose, of spirituality.”
He gives the example of one of their community hubs in London’s Waterloo, which among other things encompasses schools, a church, a children’s centre, a farm, a food bank and much more. “Last year we served the needs of 27,000 people, 65 per cent of whom were children — all from that one centre,” he said.
Last year Oasis Restore, the UK’s first secure school, run in partnership with the Ministry of Justice, opened. “The wonderful thing about Restore is that in a sense it’s the fulfilment of everything that Oasis is, because it’s a home and it’s a school and it’s a health centre. There’s a big NHS team that works alongside us, so it brings together my boyhood vision.”
For all Oasis’s many achievements, Steve Chalke is adamant that much remains to be done, which is why the charity has adopted the slogan “no one left out” or #NOLO. “Experience tells us that strong communities are the foundation of a just and thriving society, where no one is left out. No neighbourhood left behind. No person excluded. No child or family unsupported,” he said.
Perhaps it is the prospect of the looming birthday that makes him carefully consider his biggest achievement. “The thing I’m most proud of is that if I don’t wake up tomorrow morning, Oasis would operate without me, completely, and that has always been my goal.
“Paul Simon had a song called One Man’s Ceiling is Another Man’s Floor and I’ve often said that to the Oasis staff. My job is to get us as far as I can possibly get us — the day I leave, that’s the floor you start at.”
