Tuesday 7 April 2009

Bradford and Leeds week - looking to next year

Straight from New Word Alive (see my other, ongoing posts), I arrived in Bradford late on Saturday and am here until Easter Sunday thinking and praying about what I'll be doing next year. One option I have is to do a course called Transform. This is run by a group of Christians, originally based in Leeds but since expanding to include Bradford. It consists of training on Mondays (theology and practical guidance such as time management), a 5-hour placement, a 15-hour placement and a part-time job.


My interview for it is on Thursday and in addition during this week I'm taking the chance to look at different places I could do some of my placements if I do the year.

I'm also looking into an organisation called Christians Against Poverty (CAP). CAP are a debt counselling service that also offer money management courses, and whilst centrally run from their offices in Bradford most of their direct work with the people in need is done in centres around the UK that are run by and partnered with local churches. They are an explicitly Christian group, partly given their name but also through the offering of prayer on their first meeting. There's no hidden agenda, nor any need for the service users to be Christian, it's just, well, if you have faith in Christ then it'd be a bit harsh to just help someone with their earthly debts and not tell them how they can sort out their spiritual debts and be set free!


CAP offer their own internship scheme, called Reach, which sees you working Monday to Thursday with on-the-job training, and then Fridays are set aside for management-based training. There are five streams (Client, Communications, Evangelism and Discipleship, IT, and Partnership) and each offers a different challenge and opportunity to help make a difference to many people's lives. Whatever happens, it's just great to find out more about the work they do.

I'll give some updates throughout the week about how things are getting on.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Mate, I had some training with CAP, and they are pretty awesome!