Whilst The Feast was established in 2008, the story of The Feast actually goes back to the year 2000. That was when our founder and chair of trustees, Dr Andrew Smith, ran his first event for Christian and Muslim young people whilst he was working for Scripture Union. Called Faith and Young People it drew together approximately 50 young people from across Birmingham and they spent the day getting to know one another, discussing their faith and exploring the similarities and differences they found between the two faiths. Following that event Andrew went on to run a number of events over the following decade. As time went on interest in the work grew, both in terms of young people wanting to participate and adults interested in this way of working.
During 2008, in order to build greater capacity in the work, Andrew brought together Christians from the Sparkhill area to consider whether they could set up a charity which would be an Associate Trust of Scripture Union. After much prayer and discussion a group of 5 people agreed to become trustees and work towards setting up the charity and seeking funds. In the autumn of 2008 the trust was formed and granted charitable status in February 2009. We were greatly helped in the setting up of The Feast by the generous support of The Springfield Project who offered us office space and rooms for meetings and youth events. This then became the home of The Feast.
In July of that year we advertised and appointed our first schools worker – Natasha Griffith. Her brief was to work in Golden Hillock and Moseley schools to build good relationships with Muslim pupils and staff and to network with local churches to meet Christian young people and then to run events that brought the two groups together. At the same time The Feast was joined by Jenni Creasy who came as a gap year worker and she and Natasha quickly developed good relationships with young people and set up a number of innovative events bringing together Muslim and Christian young people.
In February 2010 The Feast was able to employ Tim Fawssett as our project manager. He and his family moved from Brisbane, Australia to work with The Feast. With the team of three the work expanded quickly from 4 events in our first year to over 25 in the second. In the autumn of 2010 we were able to develop work with Broadway school in the Aston area of Birmingham. This built on work Andrew had been running with this school as part of the Faith and Young People event. This enabled us to employ Jenni to focus on the work in that school and in the early part of 2011 we were offered the chance to hire office and youth work space in the Community Safe Haven at Broadway School. As the scale of the work increased rapidly we took on Rachel Pattinson as a part time administrator assisting Tim in the smooth running of the project.
Within just 18 months The Feast had taken on 3 full time and 1 part time member of staff and were based in 2 locations in Birmingham. Increasing numbers of Christian and Muslim young people were taking part in a wide variety of quality events all the time having the opportunity to explore their own faith and the faith of those they were meeting, build friendships with people from different backgrounds and change the lives of those they met as well as their friends and families.
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