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The Feast
The Feast LUTON newsletter SUMMER 2019

This is our sixth newsletter from Luton. The aim is to keep you informed of what is happening with The Feast in Luton. Please feel free to print out copies of this newsletter or email the electronic version to your friends, family or faith group.
What is The Feast all about?

Our vision is to see young people who are confident in who they are, yet have the skill to engage positively and respectfully with those who are different to them. We help young people take proactive steps to build bridges towards people who come from a different group or community than their own.

The basis of our work are our guidelines for dialogue – not rocket-science, but life-changing when put into practice. Time and time again we hear how people’s conversations with those who have a different perspective have been transformed through putting into practice these guidelines for dialogue.

This edition's featured Guideline for Dialogue: 
Do not judge people here by what other people of their faith or community group do elsewhere 
 

We all carry unconscious biases towards others. In peace-making, we make a conscious effort to set aside our pre-judgements and learn to embrace the other person as an individual. Whatever else has coloured our views on the group they come from, we choose not to judge the person in front of us by that bias.

Thursday Base

We have been working with the young people from Farley Hill Methodist Church.

There, in partnership with the Eden Project and with funding from the Methodist Circuit as well as some from Farley Big Local, we ran a weekly after-school club. We play games, chill out, and do activities such as baking or craft.

Thanks to funding from Your Say, Your Way, we were able to sit down for a meal together each time.Sitting down to eat together facilitated a natural space for discussion and conversation and the young people were able to learn to listen to someone else's perspective and learn from it, as well as lay aside pre-conceptions about one another.

The young people who came experienced the safe parameters that the Guidelines for Dialogue create. It allowed them to discuss topics such as bullying, respect for teachers, veganism, looking after the environment, but also faith-related topics such as forgiveness or whether Jesus really is alive.

Comments such as: “Thursday Base is my safe space” or “I can come and know no-one will judge me” demonstrates how the guidelines for dialogue can impact the ethos of a group to create a non-judgemental welcome.

Although The Feast’s involvement in Thursday Base will come to an end this summer, the group will continue under a different leadership. But we know the ethos will remain the same: accepting people for who they are, no matter who they are, without judgment.
Gamechangers 

One of our projects this year is with a diverse group of Year 7 students in a local high school, firstly helping them develop in their own identity, but then teaching them what it looks like to engage respectfully with people who have a differently shaped identity.

Taking them outside the school context gives them a less constrained space in which to practice discussions, using our guidelines for dialogue. We have visited the Luton Town Football Club and dialogued about achievement, success and failures. And we visited the Houses of Parliament, where we talked about what we thought makes a good leader.

“I don’t normally listen to other people, but today I learnt the value of listening to someone else’s view”, one of the young people reflected.
Scavenger Hunt and Creams

As well as our work in schools, we continue to bring together young people from different places of worship – in May it was a Scavenger Hunt followed by ice-cream and dialogue. There is a lovely friendship developing between some Muslim girls from the Oasis Centre and some Christian girls from Hope Church. Our youth encounters have facilitated the breaking down of barriers and made girls from very different backgrounds feel not only at ease with one another, but able to talk about the things that matter to them, including faith. That’s what peace looks like.
10 for 10,000

This year is The Feast’s 10th anniversary as a charity. We have been marking the year in various ways: 10 translations of our Guideline for Dialogue, 10 stories of changed lives…

We are also running the 10 for 10,000 challenge: £100,000 will make a huge difference towards helping us support 10,000 more young people to talk faith, make friends and be peacemakers.

If you want to support our work, please go to our website or click on the link below.
Click to support our work
Keeping in touch 

Thank you to all those who have already signed up to our Luton newsletters - if you are not sure whether you are going to be kept in the loop in the future please click the link below.
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The Feast Youth Project (The Feast) is committed to ensuring that your privacy is protected and that data collected will only be used in accordance with our privacy policy. All personal data collected by The Feast is collected for keeping in touch with our supporters about our work with young people. 

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The Feast Youth Project
c/o Christ Church Sparkbrook,
32 Farm Road,
Sparkbrook
Birmingham
B11 1LS
0121 818 1602