1st Ethical

1st Ethical Charitable Trust is the charitable arm of the OneE Group and is regulated by the Charities Commission. In addition to providing humanitarian relief to the developing world, the Charitable Trust seeks to empower British Muslims with the information needed to conduct their financial, legal and business affairs in a manner consistent with Shariah principles.

We work closely with many of the UK’s leading universities, mosques, product providers, and Islamic seminaries providing a variety of intensive Islamic Finance training programmes. Some of the institutions we have worked with include IFS School of Finance, London School of Economics, Oxford University and Markfield Institute of Higher Education.

These courses are complemented by numerous presentations at mosques throughout the country explaining how to pay Zakah on contemporary financial assets and how to prepare legally valid Islamic Wills. The Trust produces an annual Zakah guide which is distributed to the public via 150 leading British mosques.

The Trust also helped established the UK's first home grown panel of Shariah scholars specialising in contemporary legal and financial dilemnas - Al Qalam (http://www.alqalam.org.uk/). In collaboration with Al Qalam, 1st Ethical provide a fiqh support service to British Imams, as well as providing contemporary sermons (khutbahs) which are delivered at mosques throughout the UK. All these efforts represent a sustained effort to raise awareness at a grass roots level.
 
The 1st Ethical Charitable Trust has also published an extensive range of educational literature on topics such as Zakah, Islamic wills, Shariah-Compliant investments and alternatives to interest, and operates an extensive online Shariah resource library, along with a series of easy to follow on line webtorials.

1st Ethical also provides a business angel service to British based entrepreneurs by facilitating shariah compliant equity finance to qualifying companies, thereby demonstrating clear proof of concept of a viable alternative finance model to the prevailing interest (riba) based system.