Tuesday 14 February / 7 p.m. / Unitarian Church, Emmanuel Road, Cambridge CB1 1JW

Next week Cambridge Unite Community, in collaboration with Cambridge Area Momentum and the Cambridge People's Assembly, will hold a free community screening of Ken Loach's acclaimed film I, Daniel Blake. The film depicts the new cruelty of Britain's welfare system, redesigned by the coalition and Conservative governments to punish their scapegoats for austerity: here, that means those of us who are unemployed or disabled (as for other state agencies it means those of us who are immigrants).

Sunday 1 May / 12 midday / Parker's Piece, Cambridge CB1

To mark International Workers' Day, our friends in Cambridge Unite Community will hold a rally on Parker's Piece against the policies that worsen our city's urgent housing problem. In protest at soaring prices and rents as well as agents' exploitative practices, we'll raise a tent city on the common to demand more council housing, an end to the right-to-buy which eats away that stock, and rent controls in the private sector. Bring a tent if you have one!

Saturday 30 January / 12 midday / Spiller's Mill, Mill Park, Cambridge CB1 2FN

Our friends in Cambridge Unite Community will hold a picket on Saturday outside Spiller's Mill. The historic industrial building was destroyed by fire in 2010 and rebuilt as a block of nineteen luxury flats, all of which have now been bought by the Howard Group for an undisclosed price that the Cambridge News places around £11m.* The picket is part of Unite Community's tireless campaign for affordable housing in our city, following its widely-noticed march in November (see the Guardian article by Jessica Labhart). These latest luxury flats, which the News reports 'are not going to be marketed locally', symbolize the distortion of the Cambridge market.

Saturday 21 November / 12 midday / Market Square, Cambridge CB2

In July the chancellor George Osborne announced a 'new settlement' for permanent austerity, resting on an increase in the minimum wage alongside massive cuts to tax credits. Four months later that settlement is crumbling, in widening alarm that (according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies) three million low-paid families will lose an average of £1,000 a year: the alarm extends to Conservatives like Heidi Allen, the new MP for South Cambridgeshire, who used her maiden speech to criticize the cuts to tax credits, and to the House of Lords, which last month defied the Conservative majority in the Commons with a remarkable vote to delay and review the cuts.

Saturday 14 November / 11.30 a.m. / Regent Terrace (off Parker's Piece), Cambridge CB2

Affordable housing is badly needed in Cambridge. Sale prices are well out of the reach of most workers in the city at an average of £419,000 last year, driven up not only by workers' demand as the local economy grows, but that of the global rich for homes for their student children, and – feeding on the former – that of buy-to-let landlords and even 'buy-to-leave' speculators. Rents are correspondingly high but may well afford poor accommodation. In a long-continued period of rising world inequality, we're seeing local houses and flats being pulled into global markets.

Saturday 18 July / 12.30 p.m. / Sports Direct, Lion Yard, Cambridge CB2 3NA

Cambridge Unite Community has called a picket of this branch of Sports Direct in protest at the company's practice of hiring the majority of its staff on insecure zero-hours contracts. This is a company which, as reported in today's Guardian, can afford to pay its managers total bonuses of £155m after a pre-tax annual profit of £300m. It and others can afford better terms for workers.