Church Urban Fund Practical Impact Conference

6th April - Euston, London

We had over 200 community workers, project managers and church leaders at Friends House, Euston for Practical Impact 2011.  Please find below some of the presentations and notes:

• Elizabeth Bayliss - Flourishing in Tough Times
• Working with other faiths
• Church Buildings as Social Enterprise
• Social Enterprise workbook and checklist
• Effective Grant Fundraising
• Jonny Baker reflections

Faithfully Volunteering is a good practice guide for faith-based projects involved in volunteering; for volunteer centres, and Councils for Voluntary Service that work with faith-based projects.

The resource has been fully revised for 2012. We are grateful to Liverpool Volunteer Centre, Churches Together in the Merseyside Region, Merseyside Jewish Community Care and Liverpool Community Spirit for their work in creating the original edition.

Read more »

As the recession deepens, churches are ideally place to provide emotional, practical and spiritual help to people struggling with financial problems, redundancy and unemployment.

The Job Clubs in Churches resource document gives advice and useful information specifically aimed at churches that plan to set up job clubs or that want to help for people looking for work.

The Church Community Value toolkit is a way for churches to calculate their financial contribution to the community, and demonstrate their distinctiveness. Read more »

The Project Reflection workshop aids projects in the process of reflecting on and evaluating their work and looking to the future.

Our resource helps projects to prepare and run an effective workshop, and is designed to encourage quality participation for people who have been involved in or affected by the activities of a project.

The process of reflection creates the opportunity to share learning, create greater ownership of the decision-making process, and ultimately contributes to a project's sustainability.

By involving workers, volunteers and project users, the workshop also gives the opportunity to look forward and identify future activity and targets.
 

The Project Development workshop is designed for groups of people who run community projects, giving them space to think about how they want their project to grow and bring change.

The workshop takes the group through the steps necessary to plan and implement their work, as well as establishing a framework for monitoring and evaluating the project.  It also helps to clarify vision and communicate the benefits of the project, giving it the best chance possible of securing funding.