CDF Funding Success

The West Berkshire Minority Ethnic Forum has been a grant of £10,730 by the Community Development Foundation. The award is part of the CDF Faiths in Action project. The project involves a considerable degree of collaboration and was supported by West Berkshire Council. Our funding expert Bruce Wright helped them polish the bid in his ‘critical friend’ role. The successful proposal submitted had the following objectives - We would like to establish a West Berkshire Interfaith Group “Building Bridges Across Faiths” That will provide a platform for launching the following mini-projects:
 
1.  To launch a mentoring scheme for local authority and police officers.  16 Muslim individuals both male and female will act as mentors for the Police Officers and senior Council Officers to educate them about Islam in informal environment.
 
2.  We will run a short course on Islam in West Berkshire entitled 'Understanding British Muslims - beliefs, culture and politics'.  This will be delivered to all officers of statutory agencies.  In the second phase we will roll this out to all the primary and secondary schools in West Berkshire.
 
3.  We will develop an education programme that challenges the perceptions between differing faiths.  This will be aimed at schools and the wider community and will be developed from an existing project being run by an international organisation called 'Initiatives of Change'.
 
In conjunction with this, we will facilitate interfaith dialogues for our partner organisations and the wider audience. We will also look towards other non-Muslim groups, mainly local churches and faith workers to participate and we will facilitate these discussions within their groups and organisations (churches, temples and faith groups).