Interfaith

The BB Interfaith approach is one which recognises and celebrates difference and suggests that all faiths should be positively endorsed.  The programme encourages young people from all faiths to identify a common humanity, working to reduce and prevent incidents of faith-based bullying, bigotry, sectarianism, and intolerance. By providing an outlet, raising awareness and increasing young people’s understands of religious issues – the programme builds positive relationships and cohesive communities.

The programme embeds the core BBMentoring approach (a form of peer mentoring), but has a particular focus on faith-based and related identity-based issues. These programmes aim to empower young people to make youth-led decisions, take action over their own lives and make positive contributions to their schools and local communities.

In addition to providing support, mentors also become active in developing the wider school and community involvement, through developing a wide range of leadership skills, activism and communication, as well as actively engaging with parents, professionals, decision makers (politicians), and the media at a national and local level. Thus, the project outputs cascade back into the communities in which we are working through our peer education system, led by our newly trained inter-faith anti-bullying ambassadors/leaders. These young leaders will then, as with all Beatbullying’s prevention work, have the skills and tools to educate, mentor and support (with the assistance of experts) the next tranche of inter-faith leaders.

The project respects the cultural wishes of differing faiths and offers workshops to groups of girls, groups of boys and mixed gender groups. It takes into account the fact that young people may be becoming increasingly secular and thus do not necessarily have strong, or indeed any, religious views, but still identify as belonging to a particular religious group for family and cultural reasons. Its aim is to encourage people from all backgrounds to work together for the common good and to recognise that behind different background there is a common good and civic identity which binds us all.

In short, the programme aims to:

• Understand what the key opportunities and challenges are for young people living in a multi-faith society
• Discover how BB Interfaith can build better understanding between young people with different belief systems, so disagreement and diversity can be discussed openly without conflict, anger or violence
• Challenging young people to explore different belief and value systems and understanding how they impact young people in relation to living and being at school together
• Understanding what is the experience of young people in relation to religious and faith-based bullying.  

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