Aslamualaikum,

I pray that this finds you keeping well.

In case you are wondering who I am, my name is Adel Mohamed and  I’m the brother of Hanif Mohamed, husband of Saadia Amanulla, son-in-law of Fazl Amanulla, brother-in-law of Azaz Zuhair, Sara Amanulla & Ahmad Jahfar and friend of Atheek Saneek & Rasha Jahfar.

So now I hope you know who the culprit is who may have given me your email address 🙂

All of the above-mentioned are members of the Fitra Community School Project team. They would really like to tell you about the Project and keep you informed about it’s progress and have delegated this duty to me!! So I will be sending you an email update every now and again – unless of course you don’t want to receive it, in which case please let me know and I will take you off the distribution list.

So what is the Fitra Community School?

Well, to be perfectly frank at this point in time it is bit of a dream, but we are pushing very hard to make this dream a reality. With young children growing up, like all parents we’ve had to turn our minds to how we wish to educate our children and in our search of this we came across the community schooling concept. In essence these are small schools, who due to their size are nimble enough to focus on the wholistic development of the children that attend and be innovative in the way the curriculum is delivered. I will write more specifically about the Fitra philosophy in the coming blog posts.

There are a handful of successfully operating community schools in Victoria, Australia (see Fitzroy Community School, Koonwarra Village School & Phillip Island Village School). Our goal with Fitra is to establish something similar, but of course with the recognition of Allah and His religion at its core.

I ask for your dua in making this dream come true.

There are of course many aspects to establishing a school. What will we teach? Who will teach it? Who will our students be? etc etc . We have connected with the other community schools and are very lucky to have their support in the education side of things (or what I like to call the ‘real stuff’!!). However, for now our focus is on getting the licence to operate a school.

Core to that is finding a suitable location from which to operate the school. In Australia, it isn’t as simple as finding your spot and putting up your flag – we need to convince the city councils that we are a good idea. And they of course have the best excuses. With one place we found they said “sorry its on a dirt road”, at another they said “sorry there are trees there that you can’t up root” and at yet another they said “well you might be able to, but you have to widen the road – it’s costs about $2 million”.

Welcome to the Land Down Under 😀 … and so the saga continues!

I leave you with some food for thought:

Ted Talk – Changing Education Paradigms | Sir Ken Robinson: https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms

Interested to hear your views.

Until next time!

BarakAllah Feekum

Adel