An Interfaith Social Cohesion & Enterprise Initiative: Empowerment+

The Empowerment+ initiative will bring millennials into interfaith peer groups to find more than just a job, but career paths that are meaningful and spiritually fulfilling.

The Empowerment+ initiative fields interfaith teams that reach out to and mentor individuals, imparting practical spiritual and career skills through peer groups that focus on finding more than just a job, but employment that is meaningful and fulfilling. It will be piloted at Manchester University’s Catholic Chaplaincy (UK) in collaboration with the Manchester Central Mosque and other faith partners. The overall project is coordinated by Brian J. Grim, PhD, Visiting Professor, School of Management and Social Sciences, St. Mary’s University, Twickenham/London, and President of the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation.

The Empowerment+ toolkit has 12-week multiple tracks, channeling participants to the most appropriate pathway for them. These include: Launching Leaders and My Job Search. Other tracks under preparation include Starting and Growing a Business and Education for Better Work. The Empowerment+ toolkit is intentionally designed to be used in a group (eliminating isolation), to provide practical results (overcoming desperation), to demonstrate acceptance (ending rejection), and to model the radical spiritual power of serving others (replacing spiritual anomie with spiritual groundedness).

These groups will address these human challenges by helping replace isolation, desperation and spiritual anomie with temporal and spiritual empowerment. The spiritual power of the approach is in giving those facing problems the opportunity to constructively help others in the group process.

One component of the initiative is focused on pairing participants with mentors. See what young adults think of this “Launching Leaders” component.

Volunteer mentors — composed of people with business know-how and sincere spirituality from various religious traditions — will use an interfaith self-reliance Empowerment+ toolkit to bring those at risk of socio-economic failure into a wider group of people who help each other acquire the key ‘temporal’ (earthly) and spiritual skills needed to be empowered and successful in the societies where they live.

Read more on the Empowerment+ Initiative here.

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