Mission Year

I met two days ago with Susannah Clark, Project Manager for Mission Year, which is perhaps the most similar thing to AVODAH currently in existence in the UK.

Mission Year is a one-year programme for social-action minded Christian graduates, offering them the chance to live together and work for social justice in deprived areas of London. Their mission is "to see social and spiritual transformation in London" aiming "to enable you to make an effective impact on an urban community".

The meeting gave me a huge amount to think about of relevance to AVODAH:

• Instead of placing participants in one NGO or charity for the year, Mission partner assign their participants to a local church, who coordinate the social action work. That means, for one thing, the year also benefits the church community.

• Mission Year is also based on its US antecedent, who run the programme in eight cities. Mission Year US agreed for the UK programme - which is in its first year - to use the same name, but the organisations are 'friends' rather than officially franchised.

• Mission Year is aimed at the post-university market, partly because the pre-university market is quite flooded, but also because they hope participants will stay involved in their local church and community after they finish the programme.

• The major difference between the US and UK versions of the programme is that the UK organisation allows participants to come on board while working part- or full-time, so they can pursue their career and afford to support themselves. This was Mission Year's main method of overcoming the financial challenge faced in transferring a US-model heavily reliant on big budget philanthropy. Mission Year UK participants are asked to contribute £700 to their programme and are not given a subsidy for rent or living expenses. Rather those on the 'employment stream' help cover their house's costs and support both themselves and those on the 'volunteer stream'. So in every house there might be something like two full-time workers with one or two others who work part-time or volunteer full-time. It is this kind of creative solution than AVODAH UK may have to model.

• Susannah estimated a participant could just about cover rent and living expenses in inner-city London on £8,000 per year, with rent coming in at about £400 per person per week. The solution, however, does seem to work at the moment. Those on the 'employment stream' get stuck in on evenings and weekends (partly of course through their involvement in the local church) and help, creatively, to underpin new projects. How they share the house's and Mission Year 'family unit's' financial burden is left up to the house, without Mission Year stipulating the exact model.

• In this first year of the programme, there are 3-5 participants per house, in seven houses across London. This is a larger scale than I imagined AVODAH UK working on. Yes, the pool of Christian candidates constitutes a much bigger market than afforded by the Jewish community. But I imagine Mission Year are able to run on this scale partly due to the devolved management structure and church-partnering system.

• Participants will help their church to run food banks, debt counselling services (e.g. Christians Against Poverty), urban youth work (e.g. XLP) and the like, plus other social justice work the church is involved with. Mission year encourage the churches to get these kind of projects off the ground, but usually the church will already be involved in at least one of these organisations. Mission Year try to match up the needs of the church and the interests of the participant.

• If we were to borrow the church-partnering system and place participants with synagogues, there would be a number of questions. Is there the existing network of anti-poverty work run through synagogues? If not, could participants fulfill a community organiser-type role to foster such work? (David Russell of The Social Enterprise and Congregation of Jacob in Tower Hamlets, whom I spoke to on Wednesday, seems to think so.)

• One advantage of placing participants in already established small-scale religious communities is the churches (or synagogues if we adapt the model) are in it for the 'long-haul'. They have knowledge of the local culture and the programme is more sustainable year on year.

• Sometimes all the participants in one house are assigned to the same local church. Sometimes they are split between two or three churches, usually with good relations between them. (In Tower Hamlets there are 15 churches working together to run one food bank!) So participants often work together on projects as a team. This is quite different to AVODAH in the US, where individual corps members tend to have their own individual placement. Again, the question is whether such a network of cooperative synagogues exists in London. True, communities within single denominations work well together, but they are often geographically distant from each other. In some neighbourhoods there might be only one or fewer (!) synagogues around. Where there are more, would denominational politics be a problem? Then again, imagine if something like AVODAH could develop greater cooperation between communities that have traditionally not worked together!

• Like AVODAH, Mission Year provide a full curriculum of training and support for participants, with a focus on key skills for social engagement. Like AVODAH, they often start with some biblical text work or theology, leading into practical learning for activism. They have utilised a Christian training programme, Love is a Verb, which explicitly inspires and equips Christians to put their faith into action in tough places. While I don't think such a comprehensive equivalent exists in the Jewish world, projects like Matt Plen's and Maurice Glasman's Jewish Community Organising initiative are perhaps the beginning of training packages we can use.

• Some Mission Year participants choose to have a one on one spiritual and practical mentor for the year, someone from within their assigned church community. Mentoring is well-established in Jewish leadership programmes and would probably be a good idea.

• While the church takes responsibility for a good deal of the participant's management and day-to-day, Mission Year are free to provide things like personal support - often the participant will need an outside ear, to chat about any issues that have come up in the house or community or getting used to London.

• Mission Year currently models a skeleton staff structure (in contrast to AVODAH USA), Susannah working four days per week, her colleague Jess liaising with churches (2.5 days per week) and a Director on one day a week taking care of the bigger picture, strategy and fundraising. They have also used interns (two on three months each) who, incidentally, were paid £50 per week (useful to note when considering what NGOs and charities might be willing to pay for an AVODAH participant).

• Mission Year started in January 2010 with the first house launched in September, so the team had nine months to take care of participant recruitment (time-consuming but important, with full interviews screening out unsuitable candidates), marketing (it was easy to get churches to come on board but a bigger task reaching potential participants), designing the programme, website, developing the training and building relationships with the churches. If all goes according to plan, we will launch AVODAH as an organisation in April or May 2011 with the first cohort starting in September 2012 - a more sensible period of lead-in!

• Susannah says 25 participants in seven houses is a manageable number. She is able to give them the necessary time, meeting with each once a term... which, as well as providing pastoral support, is a way of evaluating the programme as it runs.

• Finding housing has proved one of the biggest difficulties and is also something I expect we will find a challenge. In the USA, AVODAH houses its corps members in houses of nine or 18. I called Hackney estate agents the other day and discovered most of them have never come across rentals of more than five bedrooms. Mission Year, running numerous houses, have been able to split the total cohort into houses of three to five participants each, but even finding four to five bedroom houses has been hard. The participants, church and Mission Year work together to try to find the place, with Susannah copied into all house-hunting emails.

• Apparently buying the houses outright would be the ideal - to find big investors to purchase the properties. Is this something I should be costing, as a possible route for AVODAH UK?

• Participants are encouraged (rather than forced) to institute certain practices to build and ease community life - for example, eating one meal together per week and praying together now and then. Scheduling 'us time' is something we've found really useful running Moishe House London, and Shabbat is a fantastic opportunity for community bonding. Note AVODAH USA require corps members to spend at least one meal one Shabbat per month together.

• I was interested that Mission Year had only just started, as has City Year. Also considering this feasibility study, why is this zeitgeist taking place? Susannah suggested there is a recognition that to change places you have to move into them, while at the same time it's related to economic disillusionment. Graduates want another lifestyle, another way, rather than the old city careers, which are in any case becoming harder and harder to come by. There is an increased hunger for community and an increased awareness of poverty on our doorstep. We will see what Jewish students say regarding the proposed programme, through the survey and some focus groups I'll be conducting in the coming weeks, but Mission Year discovered students were very excited about the community element. They said they want to do things as a team and share more of their lives. This was certainly part of our motivation three years ago, setting up Moishe House London.

• It's important for participants to realise what they are committing to, to manage the expectations of all parties. So Mission Year have developed a values statement for participants to sign up to: "As a Mission Year Participant I will commit to... Community Living... Living Simply... Learning, Growing and Developing... Serving the local community... Building relationships..." etc. Apparently, this values statement has gone down very well with participants.

• Excitingly, Susannah expressed a real interest in partnering when we're up and running, to introduce an interfaith element to Mission Year and AVODAH.

• Thinking about where AVODAH's funding will come from, I note Mission Year was originally seed-funded by individuals, gets a number of grants from the Christian community and asks for a contribution of £750 from each participant (which doesn't even quite cover the cost of their training). Asking the churches for a contribution is also something they're looking into, making sure mechanisms are in place to help poorer churches who would have trouble affording it.