A self-sustaining system: When our children become children’s class teachers 

The Ballarat Baha’i community has witnessed how the Baha’i institute process serves as a an “ever-expanding, self-sustaining system for the spiritual edification of a population”¹ with its junior youth taking ownership of institute activities and initiating regular acts of service under the guidance and mentorship of their animators.  

In the past year, the junior youth in Ballarat’s neighbourhood of Delacombe have taken on several acts of service, organising and facilitating children’s classes, serving breakfast at the weekly neighbourhood institute activities, and carrying out specific social action projects in the community. 

The junior youth, aged between 12 and 15, have studied the children’s class materials of the Ruhi institute from Grade 1 through to Grade 5 over the past seven years. Having now entered the junior youth program, they are studying its materials weekly as well as during school holiday camps. 

The study of the materials are delivered alongside opportunities to carry out regular acts of service, which reflect the “complementarity of “being” and “doing” the institute courses make explicit”.¹

Junior youth animator, Borhan Zadeh, says participants have been able to identify issues relevant to their neighbourhood, such as homelessness and housing insecurity, and execute social action projects in their entirety. 

“One of their most recent social action projects involved raising funds for Ballarat’s Street to Home organisation which provides outreach services and resources to those sleeping rough in the community,” Borhan says. 

“The junior youth wrote a plan, broke it up into parts and then executed the project. They organised a garage sale and colour run to raise funds for the organisation, and then the Street to Home team visited the neighbourhood activities and delivered a presentation and discussion about their role in the community.” 

In its message dated 28 December 2010 to the Conference of the Continental Boards of Counsellors, the Universal House of Justice stated that: 

Borhan says the junior youth program has provided participants with the opportunity to take on a more active role in the spiritual education process. 

“What we have witnessed is that once these young people study the children’s class materials and enter the junior youth program, not only do they have a solid identity as a collective, but they have a desire themselves to contribute to the advancement of their neighbourhood,” Borhan says. 

“Raising their capacity to become children’s class teachers and, in the future, junior youth animators themselves, then becomes a seamless process. And so, the power of the institute as a self-sustaining mechanism becomes manifest.”

Delacome junior youth Leon says he enjoys teaching because children deserve to be involved in the spiritual education process. 

“I enjoy giving them the knowledge to succeed in their life and to thrive in the next world,” he says. 

“It’s important to be involved in the classes because children need to know about the Baha’i faith and how to do good for the world, and they get an opportunity to learn about the virtues they have in them and how to practice them and use them in the real world.” 

Participant Haydar says he enjoys teaching children’s classes because it was a “learning opportunity that would also help in my adult life”. 

“Knowing how children think and what their strengths are and how to educate them can help us later on,” he says. 

He says it was “satisfying” to know he was giving back to his neighbourhood in this way.

“The House of Justice says the children are stars, and children’s classes is what helps educate them.” 

1. The Universal House of Justice, Message dated 28 December 2010 to the Conference of the Continental Boards of Counsellors[↩][↩]