Faith and inclusion: Celebrating diversity of faith within fundraising

Did you know that it’s Inter Faith Week? We have a lot of “weeks” in the charity sector so you may have missed this one. Or, you may see that it is about faith and think it’s not a week that you want to participate with or that it’s not relevant to you or your work.

Take a moment and let me explain why it is relevant to you and your work.

Inter Faith Week began in 2009 as the result of a 2008 government consultation on the development of the faith sector. Scotland was ahead of the game and already had an interfaith week and that was the template what we have now. The week always starts on Remembrance Sunday. This year it will end with a bang with Diwali.

The aims for 2020 are:

• Strengthen good interfaith relations at all levels
• Increase awareness of faith communities in the UK, celebrating and building on the contribution which their members make to their neighbourhoods and to wider society
•  Increase understanding between people of-religious and non-religious beliefs

'Religion and Belief' is one of the nine protected characteristics, although the word faith is not used we talk about charities that have a religious or belief basis as faith organisations. There are many of them, about 12,000 promoting religion and many more delivering secular services but with a faith-based root. There are even more community groups that may never have registered as a charity or social enterprise getting on with delivering local services. You may have noticed them more at the start of the pandemic when many of them stepped up delivering food to those shielding or unable to access their usual services.

I refer to it as the forgotten protected characteristic as we rarely include it when thinking about our equality statement when advertising roles. We consider faith only when we conflate with race, eg Muslim or Jewish peoples. How much do we factor in religious holidays when setting days for interview? We can be guilty of turning a blind eye, or even participating in ‘banter’ that denigrates religious belief, perhaps because it is viewed as a choice?

Not everyone wears their religious belief openly at work – we talk about people being able to bring their whole selves to work but do we only mean it for mental health and LGBTQI people and not for religion and belief? 

We haven’t prioritised work on faith in our Change Collective work so far. We will be more explicit in our future work. To start, we can look at the small changes we can make as employers and colleagues to ensure everyone is treated with respect and feels included:

1. Look at the religious holiday calendars online and identify the dates where colleagues will not be able to participate in team away days and lunches or candidates will not be able to attend interviews.
2. It’s not just faith that might stop someone from wanting to socialise at the pub (when we can do that again), or not want to eat certain food, so think about issues for everyone and don’t signal that changes are about religion unless it’s a celebration.
3. It’s common to celebrate Easter and Christmas, in a secular way. Think about celebrating other feast days, like Diwali, Eid or even Purim, as part of your organisational culture.
4. If work can be done from home (and we have learnt that more can be done than we thought) can you enable people to on the Christian-based bank holidays and use those days to observe their significant holy days? It’s a small thing but will have a big impact.

Faith organisations are hugely diverse, from the ultra-orthodox to the ultra-liberal, covering people from all parts of the world and with every one of the other eight protected characteristics and the missing characteristic of socio-economic inequality. Faith is as intersectional and intergenerational as it gets.

The report Cohesive Societies: Faith and Belief explored funding for faith organisations. It identified that faith organisations were likely to respond early to crises, as they are not insulated from local needs, and then fundraise to enhance the work they have begun. Where fundraising is from grant funders this is augmented from community face to face fundraising. It’s too early to state as fact but this COVID-19 crisis seems to bear this out and to show that where money has not come in faith organisations have had to think of more creative ways to respond.

And, the biggie for fundraising roles, do we treat the fundraising experience gained from being an active, successful fundraiser for a faith group with respect or dismiss it as irrelevant? The skills and experience are there ready to bring into our more formalised secular structures.

Inter Faith Week asks us to consider how we can constructively address issues of common concern through the diversity of thought and approach that faith communities can contribute. We owe it to the people and causes our charities serve to open our minds and learn from each other.