17 Clifton Road, Birmingham, B12 8SX
Ansaphone: 0121 440 0643
secretariat@ksmnet.org
Friday, 25 April 2025  
26. Shawwal 1446

Abbasi Islamic Centre Project

100-day Pledge: Engage local MPs and Councillors in order to canvass their support for our aspirations of building a new Community Centre.

Engaging with local MPs and Councillors is a very important task in building the new centre as they may be able to help us by pointing us in the right direction of opportunities for the community. Furthermore, it is our duty as Muslims to engage with wider society because we have a responsibility to understand the issues that our facing people today and help to devise solutions for these issues.

In order to meet the pledge of canvassing the support of the local MPs and Councillors, I have written to the following individuals in order to arrange a meeting in order to introduce our community and its aspirations.

 

100-day Pledge: Kick start the process on following the WF Capital Projects Process, so we can raise money from other Jamaats around the world.
One of the key pledges that I made was to follow The World Federation’s Capital Projects process. This pledge was formalised with the passing of a motion at the AGM on 25th March 2012. The Capital Projects Process has the following objectives:
?- To ensure huqooq funds are spent responsibly  
?- To ensure there is due care and diligence when undertaking capital projects  
?- To ensure comprehensive needs analysis and feasibility of maintenance costs are done by Jamaats and regional federations before venturing in capital projects  
- To provide a framework for developing capital projects in the community globally

In order to kick start the process, I sent an email to the Council of European Jamaats, as well as arranging a meeting with Gulamabbas Kassam, the CoEJ Capital Projects assessor.

100-Day Pledge: Ask the volunteers of the Ghusal-Kaffan and other committees (e.g. Nyaz, Nursery) to visit other newly built Jamaats in the UK to learn from their designs (and feed that back to our architects).

I feel that asking our volunteers to visit other centres and provide input to the design process is critical as we can then learn from their design ideas. The original plan was to ask the Consultation Panel to join the volunteers and the Building Committee on a visit to Leicester Jamaat by 3 July 2012. Unfortunately, this was a bit too ambitious because it has taken time to for us to form the consultation panel that we would like to take to visit these newly built Jamaats.

Furthermore, the committee has spent much of the first 100 days completing the needs analysis that will form the foundation of the design and as such it had a higher priority level. Therefore, we hope to take these volunteers along to other centres once we get down to the nitty gritty of planning the actual internals of the new centre. This is most likely to take place after the referendum.

100 Day Pledge: Publish a outline project plan listing the key milestones that we will be working towards and who will be responsible for them.

As you are aware, the overall strategy for the Building Committee is to:
1. Analyse the viable options available to the community in an impartial manner and get them costed,
2. Understand the community’s income and donations, as well as approaching Banks – to understand our budget,
3. Present this impartially at a referendum in September 2012 so we can all have a discussion and move forward to the implementation stage.

As part of this strategy, we are following the combined best practice recommendations of the following organisations: (1) The World Federation of KSIMC (Capital Projects Process), (2) The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA Outline Plan of Work) and (3) Constructing Excellence in the Built Environment (Constructing Excellence Guide to Procurement).

We have summarised how each of these processes fit together into an outline plan of the activities that we will be carrying out in order to build the new centre. The outline plan can be downloaded from here.

We are  looking for a graphic designer to work with the community engagement team. The responsibility of the graphic designer will be to prepare marketing materials for the Building Committee specifically. For example, presentations we are making to Councillors should be well-designed to reflect well on our community.

If you are interested in volunteering for this position, please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

More Articles ...

  1. The Building Committee is looking for a Project Accountant
  2. MAP Updates
  3. Building Committee Update (May 2012)
  4. Process for the Mehfile Abbas (a.s.) Project
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