I’d just like to provide you with a bit more information about our Gold Sponsor! The Canterbury Muslim Community Trust (CMCT) was registered as a charitable trust in 2014. It was created as a community led response to address the needs identified by the Canterbury Building Bridges Muslim Advisory Group (CBBMAG). CBBMAG was formally established with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) in June 2010 between the Office of Ethnic Affairs and interested Canterbury Muslim community members. The overarching impetus for this initiative was NZ Government membership of the Group of Friends to the Alliance of Civilizations. The aims are to improve understanding and cooperative relations among nations and people across cultures and religions and, in the process, to help counter the forces that fuel polarization and extremism.
CMCT organize community meetings every three months to provide a forum where concerns and other issues of interest to Muslims can be discussed. The next meeting will be held in November. They are keen to help strength the community by assisting with liaison between community members and government agencies, to help with outreach and education activities to the wider public and they have also been involved with supporting a number of other community led initiatives such as public lectures, sporting events
and social activities.
We are very lucky to be working closely with them. As some of you may remember, we collaborated together for a Potluck dinner in Eid Ul-Fitr which was a success and we have been very thankful for their generous support and encouragement for this event.
About 2 weeks after the Potluck dinner, CMCT & some of the Nawawi Center members met for a debriefing about that event and we also discussed our future aspirations. They had very positive things to say about how we ran the last event and we were glad that we could manage it for them.
I personally ran the presentation for this meeting, so I prepared some information and ideas about the upcoming Eid Festival. I wanted to know what they thought about it and if they would like to be a part of it by contributing and donating. Amazingly we were both on the same page and they loved it.
So a few weeks later, I approached the group with our formal proposal and asked them to bring it up at their next meeting. From what I heard, during the meeting they were all very eager to donate which was great news.
Now here we are, CMCT is our Gold Sponsor and we are thrilled to have their support. We hope that we will continue to work in partnership with them in the future. I would personally like to thank the members of CMCT for their commitment to help fund our event.
Please take a look at their website, read more about them and find out any further information you would like.
