Block 1 Confidence and skills to bridge and link

This building block explores how we can work together to:

• Strengthen and increase the bridging and linking social capital within local communities
• Help to develop the confidence and skills needed to build trusting and active relationships between people with different religions and beliefs and none
• Help to develop the confidence and skills needed to build effective partnerships between faith based organisations and local decision making bodies

A quote from the Citizenship report reinforces the Framework position: faith communities create many opportunities for participation in society and they have long been a force for positive social change…...They provide additional resources for dealing with social problems. And where they work across faith divides, they contribute to creating a greater sense of a shared purpose and inhibit the emergence of a "them-and-us" outlook. www.justice.gov.uk/docs/citizenship-report-full.pdf

There are three categories of social capital (drawn from The Well Connected Community by Alison Gilchrist, 2004)

• Bonding - based upon enduring, multi-faceted relationships between similar people with strong mutual commitments such as among friends, family and other close knit groups
• Bridging - formed from the connections between people who have less in common, but may have overlapping interests, for example, between neighbours, colleagues, or between different groups within a community
• Linking - derived from links between people or organisations beyond peer boundaries, cutting across status and similarity and enabling people to exert influence and reach outside their normal circles

Significantly for the debate on the value of work within a single faith community, there is a recognition, coming from an evaluation of projects funded through the Faith Communities Capacity Building Fund, that bridging social capital can often take place within what are seen as single faith communities where these are made up of many different ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

This has important implications for the Faiths in Action Fund, which will support some of the work outlined in the Framework. The many ways that faith communities can build social capital are recognised including:

• local networks with links to those who might otherwise be left out
• knowledge of local needs and ideas for how these might best be met
• management capacity
• a major source of volunteers
• leadership in organising their communities to be active, linking the development of citizenship to faith traditions 
• focal points for engaging the wider local community in projects to improve the neighbourhood and the quality of life for those living in it 
• intergenerational activities, so young and older people can be brought together to learn from each other

Who needs to take action? Everyone who is genuinely interested and believes in the need for inter faith dialogue and social action. This is not action that demands some hierarchy, it must come from within.

Extract from Burton-upon-Trent Inter Faith Network and Burton-upon-Trent churches consultation response. The consultation asked about issues that limit the ability to bridge and link. The summary of answers includes the following:

• nervousness about offending others
• gender issues
• anxieties about a single faith dominating
• poor local access to skilled facilitation and capacity building
• difficulties in engaging "worshipping communities" in other activities
• difficulty in recruiting new people to inter faith work and social action
• negative reporting of faiths in the local media

This list is important for faith based organisations intending to seek funding from the Faiths in Action Fund, as it will have as one of its aims, the supporting of local grass roots activity to develop bridging and linking.

A further resource is the National Empowerment Partnership, which is already funded by CLG to promote improvement in the quality of community engagement and empowerment policy and practice. This is managed by the Community Development Foundation, which also administered the FCCBF and will administer the new Faiths in Action Fund.

Building the skills and confidence of young people to bridge and link is seen as vitally important and linked with initiatives by the Department for Children, Schools and Families.