Vision and warmth to fight child poverty

DRUG DEALER-TURNED-PASTOR'S COATS AND SHOES LIFELINE

- BY ROS WYNNE-JONES AND CLAIRE DONNELLY

AT the Church on the Street in Burnley, pastor Mick Fleming is opening a cupboard packed with neatly folded coats of all brands, colours and sizes.

"We don't give out poverty coats," he says firmly. "If they're all the same then you're marked out, aren't you, as wearing a poverty coat, a peasant coat. We're not having that.

"We're giving something that means every kid can fit in."

He pulls out branded coats and puffer jackets. "They're all good brands, the stuff kids want," Mick, 59, says. "Different kinds of coats and different colours.

"That's not just a coat, that's self-worth, that's care and compassion and community - that's love."

Pastor Mick has spent a lifetime doing things his own way. The foodbank at the Church on the Street uses skills he learned the hard way in the drugs trade, back when he was a fixer in Manchester's gangland.

"I tell you what a foodbank is, it's a drug deal," he says, matter-of-factly. "It's really simple you take the commodity, drop it off in one place, put it in bags and then you distribute it. It's logistics."

Like so many of the people he now serves, pastor Mick has lived through extreme trauma raped as a child, bereaved, living on the streets with addictions, and sectioned because of poor mental health before finding peace and purpose through the church.

His addiction led him to dealing drugs and later becoming a violent debt collector for drugs gangs. He was arrested for murder twice, armed robbery three times, and for countless firearms offences.

"I was a hard man addicted to crack and alcohol," the clergyman says.

"I was scary, and I looked absolutely scary. Bald head, 18 stone and nuts. When you're running up and down with shooters tucked down the back of your pants and you're doing stupid things, and you start suffering from drug-induced psychosis, you become dangerous don't you?"