Past events with our Youth coordinator - Naheed Brora

One of the Southampton Council of Faiths's initiatives has been to concentrate on young people and their involvement in interfaith dialogue and debate. Throughout the last 3 years SCOFS's youth coordinator, Naheed Brora has been working closely with schools, colleges and universities to promote and encourage interfaith debates and dialogue.

They have been airing their debates on radio, as well as giving students the opportunity to visit places of worship together. She has also been working to encourage as many young people to become involved in interfaith work and dialogue as possible, as she strongly believes that our tomorrow is our youth of today.

Conversations with the young people have shown that what youths have to say is extremely relevant and important to today's  society, however their voices need to be heard and auctioned, and she hopes to do just that.

Tauntons CollegeTauntons College celebrated interfaith week by hosting our very own version of 'The Big Question'. They had a panel of faith representatives provided by the Southampton Council of Faiths, and an audience of about 200 students who had questions for the panel.This was a very successful debate and there were inputs from both the representative panel as well as the students.

The students enjoyed themselves, and later commented that they would like to be able to continue to have these kinds of debates where students are able to ask questions and converse with people of different faiths without having the fear of sounding disrespectful-

We organised the same event at Upper Shirley High. Again students came equipped with questions for the panel of faith representatives, and much to our delight the feedback was very positive Upper Shirley High

The University of Winchester planned to have a panel of faith representatives again, however we wanted to encourage the audience to be more interactive during the whole debate. So we encouraged the panel of faith representatives to come from the students within the audience. As an ice breaker we thought it would be a great idea to get the students to talk about their beliefs and what impact that has on their life. This worked extremely well as the students came up to the front and spoke so passionately and freely about their beliefs without hesitation. This was a great success, and we are planning more debate and dialogue sessions.

Unfortunately we did not secure funding for Naheed and so she is not working with us at the moment.