In the turbulent social and political climate after the Soweto uprising and the death of Steve Biko, the role of the CFT committee in the UK started to change. In the early years, CFT, through the CI, was very much the European churches’ link with South Africa. Under its first secretary, Hope Hay, CFT's focus had been on ‘professional development’ of grantees, providing opportunities for people to broaden their skills and their outlook. After the death of Biko, and given the worsening repression, the vital importance of supporting people in life-changing, painful personal challenges became more apparent. South African grantees needed both a respite from the weight of apartheid and a chance to sharpen their focus and their strategies for responding to rising confrontation.

The task of ensuring this kind of support fell to Alison Harvey when she took over from Hope as secretary in the UK in 1982. Alison had extensive contacts not just within the churches in the UK but with voluntary sector organisations working on issues of social justice and race relations. She had spent the first nine years of her life in South Africa, where her father, Aubrey Lewis, was headmaster of Tiger Kloof School. Alison's memories of those years are of black and white children playing together, of a Quaker-style study group held at the family home in the early 1950s, ‘at which all staff, black and white would raise anything they wanted, about what they were studying, what they were thinking. And all the students were black, so I had the idea that anyone who was anyone was a black student in a smart blazer!’

Alison was uprooted, for purposes of a boarding school education, ‘from Africa, where my shadow was short and dark, to England, where it was long and grey; my shadow never looked right again’. She returned to Africa the first chance she got, to Botswana as a student volunteer – and neighbour to Bessie Head in Serowe – and then to Ghana.