Statement regarding Prevent

Believers, if a discredited person brings you news, then check it in case you cause harm to others ignorantly, and then later regret what you did ” [Al-Hujurat: 6]

As a charitable organisation, we take great pride in the services that we provide to the community and we ensure that transparency, openness and integrity are at the heart of everything we do.

As a community organisation, we would like to emphasise that none of the activities funded by Prevent involved us; referring individuals to law enforcement agencies, or any kind of surveillance or working with those who had already been referred. Our focus was on promoting positive youth development, tackling extremism and extremist narrative and improving community relations.

Listed below are the Prevent projects that we delivered between 2008 and 2010:

Muslim Youth Development Project

We ran this project in partnership with Catch 22, they were the lead organisation and received the funding. Karimia Institute delivered the project as one-day workshops in various cities across the UK. The aim was to promote leadership and voluntary community work amongst young British Muslims. The outcomes were confidence building and youth leadership training. It also included running the Duke of Edinburgh award scheme in Nottingham from which several young people achieved Silver and Gold awards.

Tackling extremism in Pakistan

This was a pilot project in partnership with the Foreign Office and British Embassy in Islamabad. The project was designed by the Foreign Office, which hired six consultants to run the project. The expectation was Karimia would oversee the project, our involvement lasted six months.

The Dialogue Newspaper

This was a bi-weekly newspaper for promoting peace-building and tackling extremism. The print run was of 20,000 copies and was distributed all over the UK at mosques and community centres on Fridays. The publication ceased after six months due to insufficient funds.

We are proud of the developmental work that we did to counter extremism. It helped build our organisational capacity to serve the youth and community better and improve community relations locally and nationally. We never compromised our moral and spiritual values. In our projects, we ensured that we were promoting the moral, social and spiritual values of Islam since we believe that British citizens can benefit from these values.

In conclusion, not all the activities were fully funded by Prevent, and as a committed organisation, we also allocated ‘in-kind’ resources towards realising these projects. The positive feedback received regarding these projects strongly suggests that they were of great value for the public funds that we received.