A ground-breaking scheme offering free leadership training to young Catholics and Muslims is to launch this winter.
“Next Generation: Community” will offer participants intensive leadership skills workshops, online and face-to-face training, and the chance to explore the workings of Whitehall and Parliament.
Modelled on a Harvard leadership programme, the scheme also entails visits to government departments, chances for mentoring, and to meet regional city leaders and others in positions of leadership.
Twenty-four places are available for sixth formers, aged 16 and older. A further 16 places are for participants aged 21-33 years old. The pilot programme, due to begin by December, has been funded by the Sisters of the Holy Cross in Buckinghamshire.
Francis Davis, the programme founder, told The Tablet he had established the scheme to “bring young Catholics and young Muslims together around their common concerns for social justice and planet”.
The eventual aim, he said was, “to have cohorts of leaders that know each other and could trust each other for challenges in the future”.
A former lead advisor on race, faith and centralisation to the cabinets of the Labour prime ministers Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the Cameron-Clegg coalition, Davis added: “What I read in some of the Catholic press about what Muslims are like doesn’t reflect my experience at all. When some Catholics start talking about Islam they talk of medieval Islam. They talk about it in a UK context as a foreign religion. Eight times out of 10, those comments start from a position of not having spent any time with British Muslims.”
What was lacking was discourse reflecting real situations today, explained Davis: “If, for example you go to the Catholic girls’ school in Southampton, around a third of the pupils are Muslim and they are encouraging the Catholic girls to pray, because they are in the habit of praying.”
Davis, who is also a professor of public policy and communities at Birmingham University said Muslims and Catholics have “lots of shared historical experience”.
Catholics “were treated as a suspect community when we were first elected to parliament”, he said. “There were riots against us at the restoration of the hierarchy and we relied on our own savings to build our own schools and place of worship.”
The course is an initiative of the Wessex Foundation in partnership with Birmingham University, St Mary’s University, Twickenham, and Bishop Grossteste University, Lincoln. To apply please contact: f.davis@bham.ac.uk
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