National Inclusion Week 2024

National Inclusion Week takes place from 23 – 29 September, and the Northampton Methodist District's Justice, Dignity and Solidarity (JDS) group have collated some brilliant ideas Churches can use to get involved.

The theme for 2024's National Inclusion Week is 'Impact Matters' – a powerful message that centres around understanding, identifying and measuring impact on marginalised groups and taking actions that make for genuine, sustainable change that matters. You can read more about the theme on the National Inclusion Week website.

How can your Churches get involved in National Inclusion Week?

Share your story
One of the most profound ways we can inspire sustainable change is by sharing our own voices and stories. Over the course of National Inclusion Week, the District will be sharing a few short videos from members of the JDS group talking about what inclusion means to them. The videos will be posted on the District's Facebook page which you can find here. Feel free to comment on and share these videos!

Why not encourage members of your community to share their stories? Here's one way you could do this, but do feel free to be creative and think about what would work for your context:

• Create a thought/prayer tree: using card, cut out a large tree, encouraging people to write their thoughts and prayers about inclusion on sticky notes which they can put on the tree. This is a great way for a congregation to begin to consider inclusion.

Host an inclusion panel
Consider hosting an inclusion panel in your Church/Circuit – those on the panel can share their experiences of inclusion and exclusion, and you could follow-up with tea and biscuits, or even a finger buffet of food from across the world!

Volunteer
Encourage your congregation to consider volunteering for a charity. This could be a great way to take a person beyond their own personal experiences. Would they then be willing to share with your church how they found their volunteering experience and why it was valuable?

Sharing different cultures
Food, recipes, music, traditions, films... there is an incredibly vast array of ways that cultures express themselves. Wouldn't it be amazing if, maybe one Sunday after church, members of your church were encouraged to bring along items or share stories about their own cultures and experiences? Imagine how much we could learn about each other!