Champs Toolkit

Thank you for being the Champion for the First Thousand Days (FTD) in your church. This is a crucial role to see many families supported to give their children a strong start to life. Welcome!

Sikunye, we are together

As a Champion, you are leading and influencing within your church and surrounding community. This toolkit is intended to help you better understand, better prepare, and better serve families. This is not a formula to follow – your church has unique strengths and opportunities that can be explored – use this toolkit to help you identify and think through where your church can use these strengths to best support families.

You are not alone as a Champion. You are working with your pastor, you have Sikunye to support you and a growing network of Champions in other congregations who can inspire, share learnings with and encourage you.

Thank you for joining the movement of churches giving all children a strong start to life.

1.

Get things moving

As a Champion with a passion for seeing families cared for, there may be some easy first steps you can take. Even as you dream big, here are some tools to help you get started.

2.

Recruit and lead a team

As a Champion, you cannot serve every family and reach into the broader community by yourself. You need a team that can give attention, energy, time and their unique skills to sustainably serve families. Explore these tools to better understand your role and how to grow and sustain your team.

3.

Be an example of loving connections

As a Champion, you will be mobilising, stirring others, creating opportunities for various people to serve. Be sure that you are a growing example of what this looks like. Grow your personal conviction, connect with families, be the example of loving connections.

4.

Inspire others to create loving connections

Beyond the team that you will mobilise into specific areas of FTD ministry, engaging the whole church community is important to see change within your church. By inspiring and winning others over, you are also helping prepare people to engage with FTD in their workplaces, neighbourhoods and other spheres of influence.

5.

Connect with others churches and services

Your church exists within a community that has a range of services for families in the FTD. Rather than taking it all on yourself, explore ways that you can connect and partner with other churches and service providers, whilst increasing your knowledge of what is out there and available to families for you to refer to – but also how to minimise any gaps so that all families are supported.

This toolkit is here to help you, the Champion of the First Thousand Days in your congregation, build loving connections with families.

Discern with your pastor, knowing the unique context you are in, with the unique families you have, the best ways you can become FTD-friendly. Stay in touch with Sikunye (info@sikunye.org.za), share feedback and spread the big idea.

We are in this together.

You can access this because you have successfully registered as a Champion with Sikunye. If you were sent a link to this page from someone else, we ask you to explore the rest of the website to get the big idea, and to activate your church. This will allow you to be kept up to date with new resources, be connected to other churches becoming FTD-friendly and be notified of upcoming events.