The Journey

Right now today EVEN AS YOU READ THIS there are people dying because they do not have enough money to survive.

According to the United Nations there are roughly 1 billion people worldwide living – and dying – on less than $1 per day. It is this level of poverty that makes simple, treatable diseases like diarrhoea into a lethal killer. Floods, droughts, unclean drinking water and a lack of food become nightmare figures in a life and death struggle. One in three of the world's population live on less than $2 per day. This is poverty too. Schooling and access to medical treatment are too expensive for many of these people, increasing their vulnerability to sex traffickers and employers that exploit their desperate workers.

You've just bought this record hoping to find some great songs you can sing along to in the car and you're already being preached to. Even worse than that; preached to by a bunch of songwriters living a million miles away from the shocking statistics above.

But this is a new day, the sort when we all have to make a response. Whoever we are, whatever we do, we cannot call ourselves humans any longer unless we take care of each other. That means our neighbours down the street struggling to pay the rent, or our neighbours in other continents desperate to find enough food to make it through the day.

In January 2008 – after a year and a half of planning – Anna and I were joined by 11 other songwriters for the first CompassionArt retreat. Next to a Scottish Loch a few hours north of Glasgow, a dozen songwriters gathered to become a team. Holding us together was an acheing and a longing to write music that would not only highlight all these issues but eventually raise some serious cash to help the poorest of the poor. It was a crazy experiment and our egos had to be left at the front door. It was extraordinary, beautiful and perhaps historic. By the end of the week twenty two songs had been birthed, tweaked and re-written by all twelve of us. We loved every minute and our lives will never be the same for the experience.

Four weeks later we found ourselves at Abbey Road Studios to record the best fourteen tracks from the retreat. Five days after that we had the bones of an album; songs that people could love and sing around the world.

Let me explain why this is so exciting for us, groundbreaking even.

When you sing a song in church it actually makes money.

A royalty is paid to CCLI – the global body that oversees the process. They take out a small percentage to cover their administration costs and then pass the remainder of the royalty on to the songwriter's publisher who take a cut themselves and then pass what remains to the writer of the song who then splits it with a management team.

Why am I telling you this? Because what comes next is significant...

Everyone involved in these songs from writers to publishers, managers to the TEAM at CCLI have waived all their rights and allowed CompassionArt to own the copyrights.

There are no 'aces' up the sleeve for anyone and everyone has given something away to make something extraordinary happen. What always gets described as a good cop/bad cop industry – with the musicians the good and the men in suits the bad – is simply not true here; with CompassionArt everyone's playing their part. We are so proud to see our music world come together and unite at a time when record sales are poor and profits are lower than ever – the kind of time when you'd expect people to hold on even tighter to what they've got.

But by giving all the proceeds away we have made a statement of intent, and tried to help change this world that God loves.

Every songwriter has chosen a charitable project that will share in half the PROCEEDS that these songs raise.

The projects supported include those that offer people primary health care, clean water, education and more.

But we also want to do something together, we want to invest in 4 projects that would join the dots between art and compassion.

Firstly we are going to help the ongoing work of Hand of Hope who run a refuge centre in Prem Kiran, Mumbai, India for mothers and their children in the commercial sex industry. They also run an educational progaramme which sends classroom buses into one of the trash heaps in Phnom Phen, Cambodia. We will help the community of children there, who are forced to work for just 50 cents a day, many of whom are sick and diseased.

The second project is very much related to the album. We wanted to record an African children's choir on some of the songs and so what better place to go to than Kampala in Uganda to visit Watoto. Watoto works with orphaned children; educating, nurturing and generally bringing them up with love and care. We are amazed by what they are doing and want to start by building a creative arts centre in one of the villages where they look after 1,000 orphaned children - most of who lost their parents to AIDS-related illnesses. This is as much a part of God's healing as food and water; all are essential to feed body, soul & spirit. We not only want to provide cash but a CompassionArt team who will go and train the next generation of African artists. We will start in Africa and dream for this 'model' to spread to all the continents of the world.

The third project is with Ray of Hope who are restoring 'forgotten' communities living in the Amazon in Brazil, they are providing food, clothing and medical care and are now strategically building schools in remote locations for these people.

The fourth project is with Stop the Traffik, a global campaign partnering with the United Nations to bring an end to the modern day 'slave trade'. People trafficking is the fastest growing organised crime and CompassionArt wants to help stop it. All 4 projects funded by these songs, pulling faith and art into focus together.

The truth is that all this started as a response to the question; how do artists engage in poverty?

What we've discovered is that we've only just scraped the surface when it comes to revealing the enormity of ways in which we who write and play and sing and dance and paint and act and sculpt and cut and paste can get involved in breaking poverty's strangle hold. This is a new day and we're so glad you've joined the team.