JEAN CASE: Why did you decide to start Interfaith Youth Core?   What need did you want to fulfill?

 

EBOO PATEL: I consider myself a part of three traditions -- India, America, and Islam.  And I think that at the heart of each of those traditions is pluralism.  So the Interfaith Youth Core was a way to achieve that kind of coherence in my own life.  I was very inspired by youth service movements, from the Peace Corps to Teach for America to City Year, Public Allies, and Youth Service America.  And I thought the best way to achieve pluralism was to have young people work together.

 

JEAN: How did the organization start?

EBOO: There were a group of young people of different backgrounds at a conference by a group called the United Religions Initiative.  We kept on asking ourselves the question why aren't there more young people involved in interfaith work? And why isn't there enough concrete service in the interfaith movement?  And at one point I just said, why don't we build it?  Why don't we make it happen ourselves? There was enough energy and "move forwardness" in that group of young people and in myself that here we are eight years later, in the process of building that movement.

 

I started as a grad student at Oxford in the fall of 1998, and basically spent my time going all over the world running youth projects. I worked in South Africa, Sri Lanka, India, and all across Europe running these interfaith youth projects.  And I was building a theory and a methodology along the way.

 

The principles of this organization are to engage religiously diverse young people to strengthen their own religious identities; build understanding between religious communities; and encourage cooperation to serve the common good. Those principles sound very simple, but they come after three years of running projects all over the world. 

 

I got my Ph.D. in 2002 and returned to Chicago, the city I love. Instead of walking the academic path, I decided what I really wanted to do was build this organization.  I was prepared to basically live in poverty to get it off the ground -- which we were doing. Then, almost by chance we got a grant from the Ford Foundation. I ran around Chicago for a few months and leveraged that Ford Foundation grant, and came up with enough resources to hire one full-time staff person and a few part-time people. I had another full-time job that year, and basically spent my evenings and weekends working on the IFYC.

 

Fundraising is key to movement-building. If you have no resources, you have no movement.

One of the things that I do [when fundraising] is to ask people if they want to live in a world where religiously diverse young people can strengthen their own religious identities, where we can build understanding between religious communities; and where we can encourage cooperation to serve the common good. You can bet that al Qaeda is investing in the other kind of world.  We don't get a free ride here.

 

This is the core idea I articulate to investors: Osama bin Laden doesn't run bake sales.  He doesn't run his network on the cheap.  If you want a different kind of world, a kind characterized by understanding and cooperation, why wouldn't you expect to pay for it?

 

The principles underlying the interfaith movement coalesce into a big idea -- if you are young and religious, part of what you need to be about is coming together with people who are different from you to build understanding and cooperate to serve others. It's going to take all kinds of programs and no small amount of resources [to get it done].

 

JEAN: When you were thinking about how to bring young people together, how did you decide where to begin? What kinds of projects motivated you in the conversation?
 

EBOO: We operate under what we call the Willie Sutton philosophy of organization. People asked Willie Sutton why he robbed banks, and he said because that's where the money is.  People ask where do you go to find religious kids? We go to religious communities, because that's where the religious kids are.  We want religious communities to be the lever that encourages their young people to be involved in service projects. 

 

Take Habitat for Humanity, for example.  Habitat knew there was an energy within communities to do service, and it gave them an activity.  In the process, Habitat connected them to a big idea -- ending poverty housing.

 

We have learned a lot from Habitat for Humanity.  We know that there's an energy within religious communities to both do service and to encourage positive engagement of religious diversity. And  we want to create activities that facilitate that.

 

Teach for America is another organization we have learned a lot from.  Wendy Kopp has done a powerful job with Teach for America. In some ways, we'd like to be the early 21st century version of  Teach for America or Habitat for Humanity.  We'd like to be known as the organization that unleashed a positive energy for our generation, and connected them to the big idea of engaging religious diversity constructively.

 

JEAN: Your work directly addresses the idea that communication is the key to understanding differences, and ending misinformation about other religions. What is it about faith, which is such an integral part of people's identity, that can make it difficult to discuss?  

EBOO: Faith is the most precious thing that parents hand down to their children -- ideas about how to connect with God.  And anything that precious can easily get fraught.  Throughout history, religion has been a private language for use within religious communities.  And now that the world is defined by diversity and interaction, what we need is a public language of religion -- in other words, ways that religious communities can talk with each other, rather than only talking about faith within the community. We need a public language of religion to build a positive relationship among religious communities.

 

JEAN: Have you found in your work that young people are more or less willing to discuss with one another what they believe in?

 

EBOO: They love it.  And I'll tell you why.  So many religious young people effectively live dichotomized lives.  You'll find religious young people that will have two birthday parties -- one for synagogue friends and another for school friends.  It's separate, because they haven't been taught to bring these two parts of their lives -- their faith life and their school life -- together.

 

So when Interfaith Youth Core provides them with a space and a language to engage a diverse world as a young person of faith, in some ways they can feel whole.  It provides a space where they can talk with their friends of other religions about their own backgrounds.

 

 JEAN: What has surprised you about working with young people of different faiths?

 

EBOO: They thirst to be part of a movement.  They thirst to live beyond themselves.  I knew that that existed, but over and over again I'm overwhelmed by the depth of desire to connect with the broad range of humanity that I see in young people.

 

JEAN: That's an interesting point, because sometimes people write off kids, thinking that they're always focused on their own lives and that's all.

 

EBOO: You know who doesn't write off kids?  Religious extremists.  Think about the stories you hear of religious violence. It's always committed by 21-year-olds. The 21-year-old isn't directing the religious violence.  The 21-year-old is involved because a religious extremist recognized the power of young people and got them involved.

 

If all that the rest of us are offering the 21-year-old is the chance to make the T-shirts for the conference, we can forget it. If you don't see power in young people, you can just forget it.  Game's over. 

 

The people who work at the IFYC grew up feeling that they could do more than other people let them do.  So this organization is a way to create that space to let them do more for other people. We have people who are leaders in their fields dealing with our young people. Why? Because all young people deserve that.

 

JEAN: Part of your goal in bringing these young people together is to get them to understand the role of service in their own traditions of faith.  Do you find that they come away from the experience having learned more about their own faith as well as others? 

EBOO: Absolutely.  It's one of the only times when young people are asked to talk about their religion.  They're being asked by other people to talk about the idea of service in their own religion -- and they'll say  there's this story, or this song, or my pastor says.  When young people hear one another talking about these things, their eyes snap open. "Oh my gosh, I understand much more about my religion than I thought I did."

 

JEAN: Describe how National Days of Interfaith Youth Service started in 2003, and how they've grown. How many young people will participate this year?

EBOO: Our original project here in Chicago was a youth council, made up of youth from diverse religions that would come together to do service regularly.  The first council might've been six kids.  This was before we had funding, when we were basically volunteering.  Now, the youth council has about 20 kids.

 

They wanted to go out and create a service day within their broader communities. It was the kids' idea to do a day of interfaith youth service in Chicago; it came up through a discussion between the kids and the staff.  Then we heard about a day of interfaith service in Houston and talked to the woman who was running it.  And we started to think about what kind of potential a day like this might have across the country. Why not do it in every city, on every campus?

 

We had that idea in the spring of 2003.  We started to hear from campuses who said they wanted to do this.  So we coordinated it. But nobody's born knowing how to do this -- we had to create training.  We had to make DVDs and other materials to show them how to do it.  The first National Days of Interfaith Youth Service were in 2003.

 

In 2006, NDIYS took place in about 50 sites, with at least 4,000 to 5,000 young people.

JEAN: Is it the results you've seen thus far or the work still to be done that motivates you to continue? 

 

EBOO: It's faith.  Which is both deep gratitude for the results thus far and deep hope for what we can accomplish.

 

Faith is the belief that your job as a human being is to move creation in line with the intention of the Creator.  And I believe the Creator intends for us, as the holy Qur'an says, to come together in ways in which we come to know one another.