Accessibility Search Site Map Contact Us

Local government and councils of faiths have a joint interest in promoting good inter faith relations and ensuring the positive inclusion of all faiths in local life. Are there aspects of the work of councils of faiths that are of particular interest to local government and vice versa? What kinds of partnership may be helpful?

Speakers from three groups and councils which serve as resources for local government and other public bodies in different ways offered reflections on some of the aspects of this: information, consultation, celebration and regeneration. Founded in 1974, WIFG is one of the longest established local inter faith initiatives in the UK – it recently celebrated its 25^th anniversary - and an example of a group which is consulted on a range of different issues by local government and service providers. Coventry Multi-Faith Forum is an example of a new initiative coming into being alongside an existing, more informal, inter faith group. Blackburn with Darwen Inter Faith Council is a new council formed in the context of concern for inner city regeneration.

Wolverhampton Inter Faith Group

Sehdev Bismal (Chair of WIFG) and Kamaljit Kaur (WIFG member).

Namaste, sat sri akal, asalaam alekum and good morning to you all. I am going to give you some background information about the Wolverhampton Inter Faith Group and then talk about the work that we are doing in collaboration with various bodies. I will then ask my colleague Kamaljit Kaur to talk about the links that we have with the local police, probation service, and hospitals.

So, first of all, some background information about the Wolverhampton Inter Faith Group. It was set up just over 25 years ago in reaction to Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech. When that speech was made, race relations in Wolverhampton took a nosedive. There were half truths, mutual suspicions and stereotypical assumptions among both white and non-white communities. Some Christian clergy were rightly outraged and they realised the need to be proactive and to encourage mutual trust and understanding between different communities. So they contacted some like-minded people from other communities and the Wolverhampton Inter Faith Group was born.

The objective of the group at that time was quite general. It was to encourage respect for diversity of beliefs and to appreciate the distinctiveness of each faith. Obviously, since then a lot of developments have taken place and the objectives have become more precise. We have quantifiable targets under the various priorities we have identified in our development plan. We undertook extensive consultation with local communities when we formulated this plan. However, the overall chief objective underpinning all the Group’s activities is still to encourage dialogue between different faith communities and actively to encourage mutual respect based on understanding. The members of the group feel that each person has the right to define his or her beliefs, ideas and feelings without being labelled by others.

There are about 180 individual members of the group and there are some 40 faith community organisations affiliated to it. Obviously, these represent large numbers in terms of their members and all in all there are thousands of people in Wolverhampton who are touched by the work of the Inter Faith Group. Our members represent all the major world faiths: Christians from different denominations; Hindus; Muslims; Sikhs; Jews; Jains; Buddhists; Namdharis; and Nirankaris. At regular conferences, seminars, meetings and social events, members are encouraged to be sensitive to each other’s feelings, hopes and ideas. Discussion of differences between different faith traditions is encouraged but, at the same time, every effort is made to find some common ground so that bridges can be built. To achieve that objective we undertake the sort of activities that Bhupinder Singh spoke about in his presentation earlier. We organise regular events such as the annual Prayer for Peace and the annual bus tour to different places of worship. We arrange school visits to places of worship and training sessions for organisations such as schools, the police, the probation service and the local hospitals.

We are also engaged in a variety of initiatives to ensure racial equality, racial justice and equality of opportunity. We work in very close collaboration with the local Race Equality Council. You will find many of our members actively campaigning on a variety of issues, for example, Jubilee 2000, the persecution of Christians in India and Pakistan, maintenance of mother tongue languages in schools, and the right to have multi-faith centres for worship in hospitals.

I think it would be useful to draw your attention to our mission statement because that epitomises the drive behind all our activities. It reads as follows, ‘The Wolverhampton Inter Faith Group aims to work with the diverse communities living in Wolverhampton in order to foster and nurture mutual understanding and appreciation between the different faiths. It seeks to arrange, encourage and support dialogue between different faiths, communities and agencies so as to contribute an environment of tolerance, mutual respect and harmony.’

In order to achieve what we have set out in our mission statement and in our development plan we have established productive links with a number of voluntary and statutory organisations. My colleague Kamaljit Kaur is going to talk about some of these.

I have been a member of the Wolverhampton Inter Faith Group for the last three years and I have had the opportunity to share my skills and the time to create peace and mutual understanding through its work. We have developed a really valuable partnership with the police, with the health service and probation service. We have also built very close links with other religious organisations and community leaders.

Liaising with the police means helping with community matters. We have acted as a mediator between the police and different religious organisations where conflict has arisen and we have helped to resolve it. Wolverhampton Inter Faith Group is recognised by different organisations and by the local authority as an important information resource. It has organised cultural awareness training for the police and also for student nurses.

Recently we have co-ordinated two exhibitions of different faiths. Very importantly, the various faiths took the responsibility to co-ordinate their own photo shoots on their different celebrations. I feel that putting together exhibitions like this is a really important process because it helps people feel that they belong - their identity has been recognised in a visual sense. These visual exhibitions represent the rich colourful picture of multi-racial and multi-faith Wolverhampton. The same could be said of similar exhibitions in other parts of the country. When I worked on the Multi-Ethnic Living Project which was funded by European funding and managed by the local authority, I was able to see how people felt when we produced a multi-cultural calendar and they were actually able to see that their faith had been represented on this calendar which is going to be distributed across Europe.

Another important role we play is that we are consulted by the local authority on various policy making bodies and also the service providers, including the Community Health Council, Health Action Zones and also the Race Equality Council. We have a counselling and advocacy service for the patients in New Cross Hospital which is co-ordinated by the Inter Faith Group. We have visitors from different faiths who go and visit the patients in the hospital and listen to them to see if there are any issues around diet, language or the prayers. If there are, we are able to take this up with the chaplaincy service in the hospital. We are presently in the process of campaigning for a multi-faith centre to be established in the hospital as well. We have received some funds from the probation service and also practical help for our fundraising events.

I had the opportunity to carry out a case study of the group, as part of my degree course. We tested out the principle of partnership in depth, related to other groups, and we have learned from that that we need to work even harder if we want to develop further on the principle of partnership.

I believe that celebrating diversity together and working in partnership is the positive way forward to create a harmonious world. It is required by the current environment and desired by many of us.

I am now going to focus on some of the work that we do in partnership with the local Council and its various departments. Not only are the views of the Wolverhampton Inter Faith Group sought on a number of policy issues, but also there have been a number of initiatives jointly undertaken with council departments. The local education authority has sought our views on the formulation of its Education Development Plan. Almost all the suggestions made by us in regard to the provision made for different faiths and minority ethnic communities have been included in the final version. Similarly, our comments regarding the local authority’s Earliest Years plan, and the Behaviour Support Plan were taken on board in those documents. The members of the group have made a significant contribution to the work of the SACRE and to the devising of the locally agreed RE syllabus. Currently, we have started work on producing an education package for schools and for use by various departments of the council and other public organisations such as the police, the local health trusts and the probation service. By the end of summer, we are hoping to produce a resource book on the different faiths present in Wolverhampton with a view to sensitising organisations to the needs of a multi faith society. This work is being undertaken in conjunction with the Education Department whose officers have given a significant time commitment to this project.

Another significant development is the organisation of visits to different places of worship by groups of school pupils and their teachers. We arrange visits to masjids, gurdwaras and mandirs for large numbers of pupils. In order to make their visits a meaningful learning experience, we also arrange a presentation by members of the faiths whose place of worship is being visited. Another example of collaborative work with the Council has been the production of a directory of places of worship. The Chief Executive of the Council hosted the launch of this much needed resource. Their reprographic department, at no additional cost to us, handled the printing of the directory.

Unfortunately Wolverhampton Inter Faith Group seems to be permanently suffering from an acute deficiency of funds to sustain its activities. Up until six months ago, our office and resource centre did not have sufficient accommodation and flexibility of use. Around that time, there was a proposal to purchase the local synagogue that was for sale. The amount of assistance that we got from the Council was phenomenal. Several members, including the Leader of the Council, got actively involved, and they organised a detailed, structural survey of the building for us to ensure that it was a feasible proposition. What is more, they offered to work with us to raise sufficient funds for the project and even went to the extent of underwriting the whole project. Unfortunately, the project did not come to fruition because it turned out to be not a very realistic and economic proposition, but the support given to us by the members and officers of the authority was a very positive feature of the whole exercise. In the end, we decided to move our office to the upper floor on the same site as our existing office, for reasons of space and reduced rent, and the local council gave us £5,000 for the necessary refurbishment.

Currently we are embarked on an exciting project involving local faith communities in the Millennium celebrations. We are planning to have exhibitions, displays, presentations, and performances by different communities as part of the millennium project which is being funded through a grant of about £5,000 administered by the local council. The partnership we have built with the local authority and other voluntary and other public organisations is productive and beneficial to the citizens of Wolverhampton as is evident by the healthy state of race and inter faith relations in our town.

back to top

Coventry Multi-Faith Forum

Revd Supriyo Mukherjee and Babu Garala (Forum Members)

One of my predecessors, Christopher Lamb, whom probably some of you know, once proposed to the Bishop of Coventry that we needed to form a larger group. The Bishop did not like the idea and it did not happen! Much inter faith work is initiated by Christian priests or Christian groups. Let me start by telling you about the Coventry Inter Faith Group. It is a very old group dating back to 1974. Another of my predecessors, David Thomas, the vicar of St Barnabas, started it. This is a very small group. We meet at a Franciscan nuns’ residence. They are free on Friday so the group meets only on Friday! When I started my work in Coventry, I tried to shift the day. Sometimes people used to come to me or to different venues, or visit another person’s house. That made a little bit of difference, but still it is the same group with a kind of club atmosphere. Most members are Christians and they have different agendas. Only a handful of people, one Hindu - an old retired person, and a Sikh man who was educated in a Catholic school, are from other faiths. That does not mean that it is not a useful group. It is actually a very effective and good one. We do a lot of good work.

Once a year we have a peace walk and visit all the places of worship. We have very good relationships with other faith communities, but as a group, when we meet together, we often find that out of ten people there, most of them are Christians. Five of them are probably Franciscan nuns whose home we are meeting at who are free on that day! So I talked to the Bishop - without the Bishop we Christian priests cannot do these things, we have to ask our superiors before we start anything! At that time I was doing an MA with Derby University, and I wrote about the inter faith group we had and how we needed something more than that. I gave the Bishop that essay to look at my ideas. Then he said "Yes, if you think it would be a good idea to start another group, go ahead with it".

Now, the Bishop invites over people of all the other faiths (mainly the leaders) to talk together. In one of those meetings, the people that were present said "Would it not be a good idea if we formed a kind of group – a representative group – and is it not possible for us to meet more often?" That was in 1996, and we named the resulting group the Multi Faith Forum. It was still informal, like the other group. What should it do? An inter faith group meets together to have dialogue or to discuss the social issues. We thought both were important. We need dialogue with other faiths to understand what the others believe. And also, it is important for us to learn about each other and how people are coping in this country as different faith groups.

What sort of activities does the Multi Faith Forum have? One early thing it did was look at the problem that we do not teach the young people to learn their mother tongue. I know some communities like Sikhs and Muslims teach their people mother tongue. Muslims also teach Arabic for them to read the Qur’an and Sikhs teach Punjabi for their people to read the Guru Granth Sahib. But other groups, say Hindus, do not necessarily teach their followers their mother tongue. We wrote to the Education Authority to say that it is very important for it to address the issue of teaching mother tongue languages as a proper subject. Before we proposed this to the Education Department, this language teaching was only available part-time in the evening and people who wanted to learn could not count it as a major subject. Now it is different and you can learn your mother tongue as a main subject.

We asked the police to come and talk about the police and racism. A police Inspector came and talked to us and we had a good discussion on that. We also invited a Buddhist monk from Birmingham to talk to us. Buddhism is expanding and people are being converted to Buddhism. We wanted to hear about his group. He talked to us about how they, as Buddhists, are coping in Birmingham, and how they are getting more people coming into their group. We hope the Multi Faith Forum, in the future, will be a kind of educational centre. The council is giving us free an upstairs part of a Millennium building in the city centre, the Interpretation Centre, to use as the Multi Faith Centre. We are hoping that this will act as a kind of resource centre – people will come and learn, there will be artefacts, resources, books, and also electronic equipment including software. This will be distributed to the schools if they need software for educational purposes.

Thank you, Supriyo. In your last remark, you spoke about the Multi Faith Centre. Coventry is embarking on a Millennium project known as the Phoenix Initiative with a Government grant as well as a European grant. This is a £50 million project. Within the project, they are going to have a visitor centre. Back in 1996 / 97 when we first heard about this project, Supriyo said "If this is a Millennium project will it just be a Christian-led one all the time?" He and we scratched our heads and said, "What about the other communities of Coventry?" It was a familiar situation. So we knocked on Council doors and talked to the politicians and I am delighted to say that, as a result, a small part of the visitor centre will be a multi faith centre. We have not yet discussed the rent or running costs with the Council. But we have talked with Chris Beck, the director of the Phoenix Initiative and explained that we are the community and we are all doing voluntary work, so any centre which transpires eventually will have to be on a total peppercorn rent and its running costs will have to be a total minimum. He asked us what we would do for furniture. I said, "You, in City Council have got a lot of stores, and a lot of chairs and tables are left that we will drag out of there and we will use them, so don’t worry about that!" He laughed and said ‘let’s take it further’.

What was interesting was that he agreed that a city like Coventry should have a multi faith centre within the city centre as part of this new project. This really gave us a lot of encouragement. After that, obviously the mechanism had to be set up, and we did this by registering as a incorporated company. We now also have a structure, whereby the committee is set up and everything is in place from the legal point of view. Sad to say, although the Phoenix Initiative was supposed to be complete at the middle of this year, due to a lot of delays it is not going to be completed until next year. But we are quite hopeful that it is going to be a wonderful project. When it is finished and ready to open, though we may have a small room, we would like to invite all of you to at least visit!

Wolverhampton Inter Faith Group has certainly helped quite a bit to guide us in setting up a new structure because they have had a lot of experience of this. In Coventry, we had, at one time, a non-Christian Council as well, but that became defunct and so we had to start something new for our community at large. At the present moment, as I said, the Multi Faith Forum has not got any grant or anything. However, once we have the centre and it is up and running, we are fairly optimistic that it will be advantageous for the city of Coventry. The City Council and Project Director seem very interested and to think that this particular centre will flourish.

The link between a centre and visits to places of worship will be very significant. On a personal note, at the present time I am involved in one of the main Hindu temples of Coventry known as the Sri Krishna Temple. We started by praying in one of the Church schools back in 1965 and now we have a purpose built big temple with a community centre attached to it. It has been regularly visited, like any other place of worship, by children from schools, by university students, prison officers, police and various groups for educational purposes. Sometimes people come purely to visit, sometimes on a peace march and sometimes for other reasons.

Visits to places of worship are important. Various communities at present moment have settled in Coventry, and they all have their own places of worship and community centres. A child, say from Hindu background, comes to the Temple with the parents and worships. When he comes with his school and his fellow school children for a visit to his own place of worship, his face lights up and he says to his friends ‘This is my place of worship, this is our place’. I am quite sure that when visitors come from the schools or other places to temples, gurdwaras, mosques and places of worship of other faiths, they will have had the same experience the same thing. That obviously encourages us tremendously to think about how we should move forward from this. The young are very important because they are the future generation. A key question discussed in the Multi Faith Forum is what we can do for them. We said we need our centre to be, not on the fringe, but in the centre of the town. It might be smaller as a result but we want it in the mainstream of city life – a place where every faith can say ‘It is ours’ and they can utilise it. That is how the Multi Faith Centre has got a place in the Phoenix Initiative. For the future, it is very important for all of us to understand that these children, when they grow up, will be living in a shared society. A multi faith centre will certainly be a resource for them and future generations. They will be able to utilise it for educational purposes.

It is very important to bring us all together. We all are at the present moment sitting here. We have all faced a lot of problems in the past and we are still going to face a lot of them, but our children have to face different types of problems. We want to give them this centre so that they can say, "In the new Millennium our ancestors, our parents, our City Council have given us something which we can say is ours."

back to top

Blackburn with Darwen Interfaith Council

Tom Flanagan, Director of Regeneration, Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council

and Talha Wadee, Director, Lancashire Council of Mosques

I think in the present company we are very much the baby of this group, taking our first faltering steps into the world. What I would like to do, very much from the secular local authority point of view, is to give you my perspective as to why the local authority felt it was important to start to engage with the faith communities in the Borough. My colleague Talha Wadee will then give his perspective from one of the main faith communities in the area.

Just to give a little bit of background to Blackburn with Darwen: it is a borough of 140,000 souls. In the scale of things it is not very big, but it is very proud of its reputation of punching above its weight in the north-west region, particularly on matters like regeneration. Perhaps the inter faith council can take that as its lead. The real impetus for the local authority starting to engage with the faith communities was the fact that on 1 April 1998 the Borough Council became a unitary authority, that is it took over services such as education, social services and transport from Lancashire County Council and so gained a much wider responsibility for the local community.

It is as part of that process that we started to look again at who we talked to about the delivery of local services, how we consulted local people and how to develop a vision and values statement which involved local people in the decisions which affected their day to day lives. For this it was very important that we looked again at involving every part of the community.

From my particular perspective one of the elements that was in place at the start of the unitary authority was a Regeneration Strategy. That regeneration strategy had a key theme of building vibrant and stable communities and dealing with issues of social exclusion and sustainable regeneration. The faith communities have been around for a long time and after some of our funding regimes have finished will still be around, hopefully! So it was inconceivable to me as Director of Regeneration that I should not engage with the faith communities. They will be a very important part of my work. I am very mercenary when it comes to regeneration. I will use every tool I can to make sure that our communities are regenerated. I will not say that I will actually make a deal with the devil, but I will certainly talk to our faith communities and make sure that we use them as a resource for improving the quality of life in the Borough!

It seemed to me that the faith communities were missing and so we had to go out and engage with them to deliver the Regeneration Strategy and some of the programmes that we wanted to see happen. The involvement of the faith communities has recently been reinforced by the Community Plan, which was talked about this morning. This is being developed in partnership with the Anglican Diocese of Blackburn and also the Lancashire Council of Mosques and the Interfaith Council is now one of the key consultative bodies of the Council. Again, there are a number of key themes where the faith communities will have a major role –"building stronger and more involved communities" and in particular in "enhancing cultural harmony" as we move into the new Millennium.

We decided to look elsewhere in the country and look at the experience of Wolverhampton and Birmingham and Leicester in pulling the faith communities together. We were not starting from scratch as there had been inter faith initiatives here in the past. The Inter Faith Network had held a regional meeting in Blackburn and the Christian and Muslim communities had held a series of conferences around the theme "Building Bridges". So there were some foundations to build on. But it is vitally important that we try to move forward and bring some coherence to the discussions the Council and other agencies could have with the faith communities. So we developed the Interfaith Council. The aims of the Council reflect very much the kind of aims that were outlined earlier this morning and in particular, overcoming ignorance, fear and misunderstanding. The focus is on the positive role the faith communities can play in society and in supporting the Council and others in delivering services and improving the quality of life, by working together on specific projects and demonstrating the commitment to partnership working. From my particular perspective that is very important, but I am sure that the members of the Interfaith Council would say, as Angela Sarkis said this morning, that they have a wider brief relating to the expression of faith in society. Certainly the aims of the Council do give a platform for that wider brief.

As well as describing Blackburn with Darwen and explaining the background to the role of the Interfaith Council, I would like to take the opportunity to outline some of the incentives that I think central government could put in place to encourage greater involvement of local authorities with the faith communities. The local authorities are soon going to get a new duty to secure the economic, social and environmental well-being of their local communities. It seems to me that the Government should be saying to local authorities, "If you do not involve faith communities, how can you say that you are fully securing that well-being?"

Again, to involve the faith communities is an integral part of the tool kit, if you like, for addressing social inclusion. This is going to be a key issue as we move forward into the new Millennium. To encourage consultation of the faith communities through the Community Plan process, and I think I would go a bit further than Howard Simmons here, is not just an opportunity but a duty. I think it is your right as faith community people to be involved. It is your right as citizens to be involved in whatever way you feel you need to be. If that means that you want to be involved as part of a faith community then the Council has a duty to consult with you, not a choice, but a duty. The Council should include reference to religious discrimination and equal rights opportunities policies in its action plans. People have made reference to the work of the Racial Equality Councils. This has been very good, but we also need to include this specific religious element and specifically include inter faith projects in the eligibility criteria for funding. We finally have to stop pussy-footing around about specifically religious activity and say that inter faith work which involves the wider welfare of the local communities is specifically included.

For too long local authorities and executive bodies in general have turned away from a recognition of faith, they have almost become anti-faith in the way they address local communities. They have got to move beyond that blinkered vision. In the old days we used to say, "We are colour-blind in the way we deliver our policies, we deliver the same services to people whether they are black, white or whatever". That was not appropriate then and it is not appropriate any more to overlook the faith dimension or just to say we deliver the same services to people of whatever faith. If children in school require halal food, it is the duty of the local authority to provide that and to recognize that specific faith requirement.

So, Blackburn and Darwen would like to move forward and actually involve the faith communities as partners around the table with parity of esteem and equality of access. together with other communities of interest. We hope to move forward on a positive note. We have been able to provide some funding for the Interfaith Council to get off the ground but obviously the future is up to them. I would now like to hand over to Talha Wadee to give a perspective from a faith community.

My goal here is just to say a few words about the faith perspective and how we feel about this initiative by Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council. Tom mentioned that we are still a baby and I can officially confirm we are still in nappies and learning to walk! We are very new and have just been set up.

The key thing about the Interfaith Council has been the facilitation by Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council of the whole process. That was very, very important, because they came to us initially and said "This is an idea we have. Are you interested?". It was a very important concept and we were very interested and came forward to get involved.

All the faith communities in Blackburn and Darwen took part in the process of developing the ‘baby’, the original idea, and taking it to its fruition. Now we have a fully formed Blackburn with Darwen Interfaith Council. We have developed the inter faith council with facilitation by the Borough Council and it has a certain level of funding. Of course we still need to find more funding.

There are four main reasons, I believe, why we faith communities welcomed the idea of the Interfaith Council:

1. Recognition. In a way it showed that the Council recognised us. It recognised all the faith communities of Blackburn as important parts of the whole of Blackburn with Darwen – we were no longer just on the fringes. We were part of that community and the lead agency within that, Blackburn Borough Council had identified that and made it public that the faith communities are important to it. The Council had demonstrated that the faith communities are important to any equation it developed and will develop in the future. So that recognition was a very important thing.

 

2. Partnership. With the setting up of the Interfaith Council, we were working in a partnership way to develop ideas and to talk together and that partnership was very important. Tom mentioned parity of esteem. We have a 16 member team of executive members, and each faith community has four members on that team. It was not about a demographics numbers game; each partner, regardless of community size, could have an equal voice on the Blackburn with Darwen Interfaith Council. The partnership is very important as is recognition of it.

 

3. Impact on policy and services. One point we feel has been highlighted by this initiative, is the fact that faith communities and having faith is not just about worship. It is not just about going to the mosque and praying or going to the temple and praying; it is also about a whole host of issues. Faith communities can have an impact on education, on social welfare, on housing, and on economic regeneration. Now that the Council is expecting that, we are part of a discussion. Tom Flanagan mentioned the community plan. This covers many issues that we might not traditionally think as being "about worship" or "about faith" or "about spirituality"; however, because we are included in the discussion by Blackburn with Darwen this showed clearly to all of the people of Blackburn that our ideas, thoughts, discussions and opinions were important parts of that community plan process.

 

4. The future in Blackburn. The fourth reason we welcomed the process of developing an interfaith council has to do with the idea of being Blackburnians. I’m a Blackburnian. I’ve always lived in Blackburn. I wasn’t born in Blackburn, but I’ve always lived there. And those of us involved in this initiative, share a common vision of Blackburn. Our future is in Blackburn and the ideas we will discuss in the Interfaith Council will be about the future in Blackburn. Anything which happens in Blackburn, whether positive or negative, will effect all of us equally. In twenty years time, in thirty years time, we want the best for our future generation. That is why it was important we felt to come together in this way.

I would like now to discuss some of the main lessons we learned from this process.

The first lesson, which I have already identified in noting the fact that the Borough Council facilitated the whole process, was that we were all equal partners. In many cases inter faith councils are developed initially from an idea coming from the Christian community. In our case we were all called to the table as equal partners by an outside agency. We faith communities will continue to lead the body, because we are all equal. That is very important.

The second lesson, obviously, is that we need to talk to all the relevant individuals and organisations within the town. The train spotters among you will have noticed that our MP is the Home Secretary. Talking to him and talking to other key individuals and organisations within the town will be very important to us. So they know that we exist, they know that we have a view, they know that we are united on many issues and will at least tell them what we think about the major things that are happening in Blackburn.

Another very important lesson is as that we have come together, faith community leaders and representatives have got to know each other and developed a relationship which I believe can then in the future.

A further important lesson - and which I mention as a note of caution to all of us – has been about just how many things there are happening in the local Borough Council! We have had a list of about 70 different strategies to comment on: a community plan, and city status, not to mention SRB and many other things. As faith communities we need to be on top of all those developments and unless we have formal bodies, unless we are united and have a united platform, it will be very difficult for us to keep tabs on what is happening. That is why it is important that we have inter faith councils.

If we can develop the inter faith council and keep tabs on all the developments in our area that need our input, hopefully in twenty years time myself and Tom will be able to come back to you and say, just like the Wolverhampton Group have been able to say, "Yes, in the last twenty years we have managed to do a, b, c, d, and we have influenced x, y and z." If we can do that and the credibility has been created, then we will have succeeded as an independent council.

Contents

Next