Champion a Muslim Child Development Waqf

Let me be frank with you: you have all it takes to make the world better than it is.

You just need to use some opportunities at your disposal. The world can reject you and your ideas. But the world is also ready to accept you and your ideas. Until you share it and prove its usefulness, don’t condemn the ideas to the world’s rejection.

This is why in the last message, I showed you how to become a da’i parent and develop persuasion skills so that you can get other parents on board with your vision for the material and spiritual success of their children

One of the opportunities available to you is the presence of other Muslim parents and would-be parents in your community.

It is your duty to wake them up from their slumber when it comes to their parenting job. You have to encourage them to embrace active parenting. This is necessary for the success of your community parenting efforts.

You can achieve your active parenting initiative by initiating a Child Education Endowment Fund project in your community. The truth is parenting as a tool for social change will require a lot of effort and full-time dedication. With this fund, you will be able to get the project going.

Your Child Education Endowment Fund can focus on the following four main areas to start with:

1. Whole Child Development

2. Children Service Provider Relations

3. Active Parenting Support, and

4. Measuring the successes of Muslim parenting in your community

Whole Child Development

A Muslim child education endowment will help you and your community develop a whole child education development project.

With these projects, you will be able to develop the full potential of your kids at various stages of their development. Your whole child development project should cater to your child’s spiritual, health and livelihood, social and mental development.

Give each of these the appropriate and necessary attention within the appropriate age group brackets.

Personally, I can suggest two main projects in this regard: educational material development and experience programs.

Children and youth in your Muslim community should never lack the appropriate educational materials in the appropriate formats for their age group at any time. And that is the purpose of your endowment fund. Use the fund to make great educational materials always and easily available for Muslim kids.

These educational materials can come in various formats such as books, audio, videos, rhymes, graphics, etc.

Secondly, by experience programs, I mean a program about things your child will experience in real life, such as TV, Internet, Apps, etc.

Most of these things have become permanent parts of our lifestyle. You can’t reject them without causing ugly damage. It’s better you turn their use around to your child’s advantage.

It’s up to you to creatively come up with plans on how to turn TV programs in your local stations to your child’s advantage.

Would you sponsor TV programs? Would you commission artists to develop better jingles? Would you partner with the stations to design better programs?

Similarly, do you know what young people surf most online? Do you have better alternatives to the sites they surf? Do you know the kind of apps they use most on their mobile devices and computers?

You need to have all these data at your fingertip, evaluate them, and decide what is toxic and what is acceptable to your Muslim community philosophy and the kind of experience you would like your children to have. If they are negative, can you commission better alternatives?

Children Service Provider Relations

Another purpose of the child education endowment funds you develop is to help you work successfully and efficiently with relevant service providers in the educational as well as social orientation sectors such as schools, teachers, media, artists, writers, movie directors, and musicians.

You can’t expect these groups to just accept anything you dictate to them. So, you will need to develop a mutual partnership with them.

You can’t expect them to fund the partnership. So your endowment funds are necessary here.

You can’t expect them to change the school syllabus or their professional approach to work overnight. So you will need to persuade them and be patient while doing so.

Your partnership in the educational sector needs to focus on schools and teachers mostly.

You can commission teachers who are already teaching in your community to develop the needed educational materials that will help the growth of your children.

You can commission some educational scholars and researchers to develop relevant educational materials as well for different age groups.

You can work together with schools in your community to enrich the existing syllabus with the educational materials commissioned by your community.

You can also organised periodic Parent/Teacher conferences to enrich the curriculum in a way that will accommodate your child’s growth as a “whole human” as well as "proud" a Muslim.

Active Parenting Supports

While you are working with children and service providers, you also need to support Muslim parents to be very active in their parenting.

You could develop and sponsor active parenting mentoring and coaching programs for especially young and inexperienced Muslim parents in your community.

You could also commission experts to develop robust educational parenting materials for the various categories of parents in your community. These could include downloadable videos, handouts, booklets, regular parenting newsletters, and self-study manuals.

You could also organise periodic parenting workshops and seminars to strengthen the practice of active community parenting within your community.

Remember: You are not just doing this for fun. You are doing it to protect, preserve, and enhance the civilisation you have been created to live in and successfully pass down to the next generation.

Measuring the Success of Muslim Parenting

All said and done, you still have an important task to do - documenting the whole experience in your journey towards building a viable Muslim community through the strength of Muslim parents.

Recording your successes and failures will give you a wealth of data to learn from in the future. You may also share your learnings with other Muslim communities so they can benefit from your insights and struggles.

You can achieve these using the various approaches to social research such as surveys, focus groups, etc.

Social research in whatever form can be very costly. You need to develop a Muslim Community Parenting Endowment Fund for your community. It takes serious and continuous efforts to bring positive changes to human society. You can resign to fate as a Muslim and not do what is necessary.

Before you take refuge under the aegis of Qadar (fate), you must have genuinely exerted all your best efforts and exhausted all your possible options. Muslims, these days, play the Qadar card too early and too easily. Most of the time, you don’t need to resort to qadar.

Leave the outcome of qadar to Allah. Focus on your responsibilities, and don’t mind how long it takes, or whether or not it is achievable.

The extent of your rizq, depends on the size of risk you are committed to taking.

In the next letter, I will show you why and how to adopt the creator’s mindset and protect yourself from the victim mentality. This is important for safeguarding the Islamic identity of not only your child but the entire Ummah. Without individuals, the Ummah doesn't exist. We must strengthen the “individuals” of the Ummah.

Teslim

The Muslimchangemaker