Supporting Faith Communities

What we do

We believe faith community projects are rooted at the heart of their communities and they have a vital role in supporting the most vulnerable in Dundee.

Our main objective has been to support local faith community projects to respond to poverty and inequality within their community. We continue to do this through various strands of our work, including our sustainable food strategy (see our Food Insecurity page).

 

How we can support faith community projects

  • Community mapping – helping projects to identify the needs within their community.
  • Funding – directly supplying funding (see our Small Grants page – link), identifying funding, support with funding applications and reporting.
  • Volunteering – recruitment (creating application/induction packs, job roles).
  • INSPIRE – We use the INSPIRE process to help faith communities identify needs (linked with) the skills, passions, interests and resources of everyone. 
  • Training – we offer Fit for Funding training as well as supporting projects to access Food Hygiene Training, Naloxone Training and more (see below).
  • Information sharing – we keep projects up to date on new initiatives, funds, services, guidance and wider funding information.
  • Advice and partnerships – we give ongoing advice to projects to help them continue to run/develop their project and connect with local. partners (including advice services).
  • Connecting – bringing diverse faith communities together to build relationships and share cultural activities, connecting faith communities to the wider fairness agenda in Dundee and Fife, developing city/region wide meetings/events/day conferences for diverse faith communities and key partners to explore and discuss current challenges facing local communities. 

Training and awareness sessions

We have also run training/ awareness sessions for faith community projects and local partners, in partnership with local services. These include:

Example projects

Lochee Parish Church

We have worked with Lochee Parish Church and CALM (Camperdown and Lochee Ministry) over a number of years to support them to continue to run their community café and food larder and develop new initiatives, through community mapping, building partnerships with local services and supporting with funding (including through Participatory Budgeting).

One such initiative was Cooking and Wonder Box classes (more information below). This came in response to a growing need for people to save money on their food and fuel bills, as well as a desire to learn new skills. We supported a volunteer to lead the classes weekly, supporting people to prepare and cook healthy, one pot meals, as well as develop new recipes each week and take ingredients home to try themselves (our recipes can be found here).

Wonder Box sessions were also run, where people learned sewing skills to create their own heat retention cooker (visit our Wonder Box page for more information).

We also ran cooking and Wonder Box classes with multiple faith community projects, including The Friary, Lifegate Church and The Gate Church. Information on all of their current food provision can be found here.

Taught By Muhammad and Yusuf Youth Initiative

We have worked with Taught by Muhammad and the Yusuf Youth Initiative on multiple initiatives, including the development of their community cafes and activities for children and families through Boredom Busters (more information below).

The Taught by Muhammad Community cafes were developed to respond to food insecurity within Dundee, but also vitally to respond to social isolation. The cafes offer a safe space for community connections and are based within each ward across Dundee. We have supported the cafes by helping to recruit and train volunteers, build partnership with local services and apply for funding.

Boredom Busters

This initiative was developed from a pilot run within the Taught by Muhammad Community Cafes, where we ran free arts and crafts activities of children and families during school holidays. This enabled families to access free activities and food in a dignified way within their community. We partnered with the Yusuf Youth Initiative to work with young people on placement to develop and run the activities, allowing them to build their skills for employment.

Despite restrictions due to Covid-19, we continued to develop this initiative into Boredom Busters. We created activity packs which were distributed through he Taught by Muhammad Foodbank, and we developed activities and resources which could be shared online. Visit our Boredom Busters page for information and links to our resources.