BPFNA’s Digital Database Project is Now Loading
At long last, BPFNA’s digital database project is almost complete.
The project, slated to launch in early 2023, is an ambitious one: a compilation of resources for children and youth (and their families, ministers, teachers, and so on…) that exemplify BPFNA’s values of peace- and justice-making. Although there are arguably many resources in the Christian sphere that already do this work, this initiative added some extra key criteria: they should also…
be culturally diverse and, ideally, bilingual (English and Spanish, to start);
reflect the past two Summer Conferences’ goals of teaching children “...love for self, others, and the planet”; and
be able to address underrepresented issues in a developmentally appropriate and trauma-informed manner.
Because this made it much harder to check all of these boxes within the Christian publishing realm, we decided pretty early on to broaden its reach outside of these parameters.
Rev. Anita Peebles
The resources team consisted of BPFNA members Joshua Russell from Calvary Baptist Church, Washington DC; the Rev. Anita Peebles from Seattle First Baptist Church in Washington, who is a co-author of New Directions for Holy Questions: Progressive Christian Theology for Families and a children’s book reviewer; and myself. Also on the team are the Rev. Geneva McAuley, a former UCC youth minister who has also served in Methodist and Presbyterian churches, and Deanna Morgan, M.Div., a Catholic lay-leader in Massachusetts. They have been hard at work, researching and collecting books, podcasts, movies, and curricula for the new database.
Now that this resource list is complete, the final step is moving on to an additional Vetting Team, which consists of ministers and members of BPFNA’s network, as well as several licensed clinical social workers who specialize in working with children. Over the next month, this team will peruse these resources, keeping an eye out for any potential concerns and pointing out if any might need a disclaimer or some nuance. Once they return their comments and rubrics back to me next month, this project can move on to the final step in the process.
I’m planning on collaborating with BPFNA’s communications manager, Erica Saunders, and web specialist, Set Juárez Dominguez, to provide the resources that make the cut, as well as the feedback from the Vetting Team. Together we’ll upload, build, and organize the database and devise a timeline for promoting and launching it.
We invite you to keep an eye out for this exciting new resource in the next few months. We would love to continue this work in collaboration with our members in the future, too. This is a living database, so we are hopeful that it will grow and be updated frequently over the next few years. There will be more information about how to share the database with your networks and contribute new resources (perhaps even your own!) when it launches.
For more information or questions, please contact me at jasmin@bpfna.org.
