The Faith & Belief Forum
Encountering Faiths & Beliefs Workshops
The Faith & Belief Forum exists to create a connected and supportive society where people of different faiths, beliefs and cultures have strong, productive and lasting relations.
We work towards our vision by implementing three interconnected and strategic goals:
Equipping Learners:
To equip learners with the skills and tools they need to handle and influence relations between different faiths and beliefs.
Building Movement:
To generate stronger community-based movement, with youth at the forefront.
Projecting Voice:
To project the voices of those we support and the impact of our partnership with them.
To equip learners with the skills and tools they need to handle and influence relations between different faiths and beliefs.
Building Movement:
To generate stronger community-based movement, with youth at the forefront.
Projecting Voice:
To project the voices of those we support and the impact of our partnership with them.
Encountering Faiths & Beliefs Workshops
Our Encountering Faiths & Beliefs workshops model interfaith dialogue and co-operation in action, whilst avoiding essentialisation through contextualising personal identity, faith and culture. With the assistance and skills of an expert facilitator, two or three speakers from different faith and belief backgrounds share their personal stories of lived faith/belief and answer the students’ questions in an engaging and informative way. After each speaker has shared their story and answered questions, the speakers then form a mini interfaith panel, responding to student questions from their different faith/belief perspectives and modelling positive interfaith relations. These workshops are often delivered alongside our School Linking Programme, which links schools from different faith/belief/cultural backgrounds across an academic year and our KS2 & KS3 Skills for Dialogue online resources programme.
“Please do thank the speakers from me and my students. They were both absolutely brilliant and we really appreciate them taking the time out of their day to share their experiences and beliefs with us. I know that it mustn’t have been easy to discuss some matters in such detail, but we really do appreciate them sharing their stories with us. It had a very powerful impact on my students who described the workshop as “inspiring” and “eye opening”.
Y8 Class Teacher.
During the pandemic we developed Online Encountering Faiths & Beliefs workshops that were delivered virtually via Zoom to enable students to continue experiencing interfaith encounters during lockdowns. We plan to continue offering online workshops in future in order to make our work more accessible to learners from a wider geographical area. Our activities are designed to help young people build religious literacy, empathy and skills for dialogue & communication. Our workshops also support the RE, PSHE and citizenship curricula, as well as SMSC, British Values and pastoral provision. “This morning reminded me why I continue to push for the value of good RE within the curriculum - so thanks for being a part of that. “ Head of RE, Secondary School)
To find out more please visit our website and you can read more about our workshops here.
