Exploring Ubuntu – One World Week across faiths

This DfID – funded project: 2008 – 2011 aims to broaden the scope of One World Week's traditional development education work with church communities to other faiths. This will be achieved through greater collaboration, training and organisation of faith-community or inter faith events.

One World Week aims to extend greater awareness about international development to a wider audience through new ways of supporting people in planning together "international development awareness-raising activities" (called One World Week Ubuntu events).
The word "Ubuntu" is an old African word which acknowledges the oneness of humanity. It has been chosen by One World Week to convey the value of people working together co-operatively, with mutual respect, across barriers of creed and culture, to explore the relevance of global issues and interdependence in their everyday lives.
Through highlighting areas of commonality between Christians and Muslims in the first instance, this will concur with DfID's strategy to “explore the scope for joint activities with other faiths … ensure our work is inclusive and that ethnic and minority groups are fully involved”.
The focus will be to work with local Muslim volunteers in England who want to become more aware of international development issues and churches who may wish to involve people of other faiths in their international development activities, as well as the wider community who are attracted along the way.
As a precursor to this project, our new guidelines, published here on the OWW website, on “Building Local Bridges Together to Address Shared Global Concerns”  will lay foundations for more Muslims to attend One World Week Ubuntu events, traditionally held in October.
In the second year, new Muslim volunteers will be supported with training, advice and materials to put on their own events within their own faith community, or with an interfaith dimension.
By the end of the project, the idea is that One World Week Ubuntu events will have become part of more local calendars as even more volunteers across more faiths are inspired to get involved in raising awareness about international development issues. 
Milind Kolhatkar, One World Week Chair, says:
"These are exciting times for One World Week.  We have just published new inter faith guidelines on our website with pointers for involving people of many faiths in developing global awareness-raising events.  Now we look forward to working with DfID in assisting many new One World Week activity organisers to become self-reliant, starting with local Muslims, so that in three years time there will be more experience of organising regular One World Week events within local faith communities and beyond."

If you would be interested in participating in this project please contact us.