Christians Against Poverty + Kingdom Code BUILD

How can your Christian faith and your skills in programming or design come together? Twenty years ago John Kirkby had a similar question. He wasn’t a technologist, instead he had a career in finance. In ‘96, taking his finance background and motivated by his Christian faith, he set up Christians Against Poverty (CAP) to help those who were struggling to feed their children, pay the bills or meet the rent, to get out of debt. Between then and now, over 600 churches across the UK have partnered with CAP to tackle poverty by offering free debt counselling, Job Clubs for the unemployed, money courses and much more.

This year at Kingdom Code BUILD, our annual hackathon, we’re partnering with CAP as well. They have set us a challenge for our weekend together:

How can digital tools enable churches to serve the poor and save the lost in their local communities?

As we gather on Friday 20th – Sunday 22nd October 2017 what projects could you work on? What ideas do you have to help churches serve those in need in their areas? What could you build to help churches identify areas of needs? What could you code which would enable someone struggling with debt to to see where their money is going? What could you design that communicated the gospel message to those who are in such need? What ideas do you have that could be designed, prototyped, built, launched in a weekend?

On Monday 11th September 2017, Jon Day, Director of Technology and Transformation for CAP, will be joining us at our September meetup to share more about their work, how they use digital tools already, and we’re going to start an ideation process around their challenge. It’s a free event please sign up.

If this has sparked your interest, and would like to find out more about BUILD you can book your place at kingdomcode.org.uk/build.