Introducing Darul Ummah- 'The House of the Community'

Darul Ummah is a multi-purpose community centre; designed to offer a range of locally based projects, to meet the needs of the local community it serves. It was established in 1997 by Da’watul Islam, and now more than 6,000 people use its services and facilities every week.

The centre occupies 30,000 square feet of space, and currently has 5 lecture theatres, 10 class rooms, a state-of-the-art ICT lab with enterprise level broadband connectivity, a library, a fully equipped gymnasium, 2 large halls for meetings and functions with catering facilities, and a large prayer hall for the local Muslim community.

This facility, having a paper value of circa £13 million for insurance purposes, has been provided for the benefit of the local communities entirely free of charge to the public purse.

Aims:

• To present a broad range of events and activities to excite, engage with, stimulate and intellectually challenge our service users.

With the Community:

• To promote and encourage the use of the centre, by a wide and varied range of community groups within the aims of Darul Ummah.
• To work together with local authorities, other voluntary groups, organisations and inhabitants of the community in order to ensure maximum use of the centre.
• To encourage activities that promote equal opportunities, health, race relations, law and order, environmental and other worthwhile community issues.
• To support the discussion of community issues

Darul Ummah prides itself on:

• Being open to all members of the community
• Ensuring service planning, content and delivery respects both Muslim values and values of other cultures and faiths also.
• Retaining a balance between all of its projects and activities.

Management:

Darul Ummah is governed by Charity Trustees and management committee members. These oversee its financial governance, overall operation within funds available, and management direction.

Staffing:

Darul Ummah is staffed by a streamlined team of personnel who in turn, are supported by a wide range of volunteers, thus ensuring that the complex is run within extremely efficient financial budgets. Those staff who are salaried, all currently work for significantly less than their peer group counterparts in other community facilities, and do so as part of their commitment to supporting the complex to allocate its maximum resources to project activities and community services.

The Darul Ummah workforce is multi-cultural and services are delivered by staff able to communicate in local community languages. Specific cultural and religious requirements are also taken account of within the context of project activities and service delivery.

Voluntary & Community User Involvement

The local community is able to fully participate in Darul Ummah, both through its projects (aforementioned) and through their delivery by trained personnel and volunteer workers. Furthermore, they are encouraged to contribute to ongoing review of the centre’s activities, through Darul Ummah’s open planning mechanisms, designed to encourage the community to provide feedback on priorities and appropriate models of service delivery.

Details of all projects are advertised via posters and leaflets, with publicity material printed in appropriate languages. Individuals are also reached through outreach work, used to increase awareness of the services available to the local community. Such promotion is aimed at all parts of the community, and to those hard to reach groups, such as people whose first language is not English or to those who have not traditionally felt able to participate in a large community centre programme, such as women being provided secure timetable opportunities designed around their convenience, such as to take part in health promotion exercise programmes at the new gymnasium.

Darul Ummah also ensures that parents with young children are encouraged to access the services within the community centre by running a mother and toddler group and providing childcare within the building, releasing parents who might otherwise not do so, to sample different projects and engage with these.

Service use is clearly monitored and feedback obtained at regular intervals to continuously inform future programme planning and resource allocation.

Projects & Services currently on offer at Darul Ummah:

(Each project is provided with its own management, budget constraints (many relying on funding contributions from the community and users) and is held accountable to deliver agreed annual outcomes and key milestones for its audience of users).

• Jamiatul Ummah- A full time independent boy’s secondary school established in 1997 with 160 students. Came 2nd in the league tables for The London Borough of Tower Hamlets and has become a pioneer in integrated Islamic and national curriculum education.
• Darul Ummah Evening School - Students from 5 and above learn their mother tongue and also develop their interactive and social skills through the use of a highly developed curriculum. So successful that it attracts students from other neighbouring boroughs. The School currently accommodates about 160 boys and girls.
• Un-wind Summer School for Boys & Girls – Where more than 400 children benefit from outings and excursions and an activity based curriculum, with an emphasis on making learning fun.
• Study and Homework Support - Study support classes where students are assisted in primary, GCSE and ‘A’ level subjects by qualified teachers
• Library and Learning Resources - Includes sections on reference material, fiction, and information on services available in the borough
• Gymnasium - A fully equipped gym for the use of the community with qualified gym instructors for both men and women with separate access times.
• Language Courses - During Easter and summer holidays for young adults.
• Adhan Radio - Darul Ummah has a radio transmitter that advertises activities at Darul Ummah and information to the local community
• Advice and Counselling - Open to all who come for help, advice on legal matters and support in using and accessing local services.
• Job Search and Careers Advice - project informs and educates members of the local community about training and educational opportunities available locally and nationally and includes an on-line Kiosk provided by The Employment Service, linked to the local Job Centre.
• The provision of Community Halls - Lecture halls, meeting halls, conference rooms, available for public meetings and community functions.
• Women’s Training Sessions – Where women from the locality benefit from various reading clubs, English language classes, and are informed of different service provision in the borough and how to access them.
• Girls Activities - Study circles, summer school, Sunday schools etc.
• Youth Centre - Facilities provided on a daily basis, where youth benefit from specialised courses, a youth club, fitness sessions, mother tongue classes, training sessions, seminars and more.
• Prayer facilities- For local worshippers.
• ICT Labs - The centre has state of the art IT facilities which is used by the wider community to help them educate and train themselves in IT.

(A full list of projects is available on request)

Wider Services:

Darul Ummah is a complex providing a range of complementary community services, located under one roof. In this respect it operates like many of the traditional ‘settlements’ established in the late 19th century on within Tower Hamlets, which have grown in size and scale, diversifying to provide an umbrella roof under which a series of community services thrive, evolving to meet the changing needs of their community base.

Whilst Darul Ummah, by comparison, is relatively new, having only occupied its premises and been formed in the late 20th century, it is already one of the most significant community led facilities in the Local Strategic Partnership Local Area Partnership (LAP) 4, covering Shadwell, St Katharine’s and Wapping.

The Reality of Darul Ummah's Funding:

Darul Ummah is primarily self financing, not by choice but out of necessity. Da'watul Islam purchased the freehold of the property entirely through voluntary donations from the local community and well-wishers.

Despite operating in its current building for over a decade, managing this substantial 35,000 square foot facility, strategic planning bodies have tended to overlook Darul Ummah, viewing it as primarily for Muslims with an Islamic focus to its service planning, content and delivery.

In its current ownership, the complex has had to depend, to a large extent, on community and user contributions to ensure its physical upkeep. The complex is formed from a 19th century Victorian building, which has accommodated a number of previous uses and has been subject to disjointed periodic upgrade. Now, with Darul Ummah’s increasingly important contribution to local life being recognized and the need to comply with new legislative regulations, there is a need to draw the complex out of the 19th century to provide ‘fit for purpose’ 21st century facilities of the same excellence in standards enjoyed by facilities in other parts of the borough.

In terms of Darul Ummah’s focus, the Jamiatul Ummah secondary school level full-time school occupies less than 40% of the 35,000 square feet of facilities, leaving over half the building remaining for the delivery, where resources permit, of a comprehensive social and cultural programme of project based services.

Of course, Darul Ummah is well known to the Local Authority and local ward councillors, whose personal and continued support has been sincerely appreciated, but it is true to say that it has not featured significantly ‘on the radar’ of the key decision making organisations and, as such, has not attracted the level of organisational, financial and service planning related support enjoyed by many far smaller organisations who have cumulatively, enjoyed considerable investment over the same lifecycle- Darul Ummah has had to operate without such investment.