Description

Founded in 2002, Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC) aims to inspire, equip, and connect leaders and institutions to unlock the potential of America’s vast religious diversity. Inspired by the idea that religious difference should serve as a bridge of cooperation rather than a barrier of division, IFYC has grown from a small Chicago-based nonprofit to a widely-known and influential interfaith organization. Led by Founder and President Eboo Patel, IFYC works towards an America where people of different faiths, worldviews, and traditions find common values to build a shared life together.
While IFYC’s original focus was primarily on engaging young people to work across lines of religious difference in ways that tangibly advance the common good, in the last two decades the organization has substantially broadened its scope and ambitions, advising the White House on interfaith cooperation and higher education programming, working with hundreds of college and university campuses to train and support emerging interfaith leaders, hosting an annual interfaith leadership institute, and seeding and developing a thriving interdisciplinary field of interfaith and interreligious studies. Drawing on and seeking to extend this work, IFYC is currently in the process of a significant organizational evolution, which will soon lead to the public announcement of a new name: Interfaith America.
In conjunction with this evolution, and building on several months of intensive planning, IFYC seeks Luce Foundation support for the launch and establishment of a new organization-wide initiative on “Black Interfaith.” Perhaps no community has negotiated the complexities of religious diversity more impactfully than African Americans and Black immigrants. Still, IFYC notes, much of what the public sees as interfaith cooperation has emerged from principally white contexts, with Black voices systemically underrepresented in interfaith scholarship. As conceived by IFYC and its partners, the Black Interfaith initiative will examine interfaith efforts emerging out of diverse Black communities and ask, “What would it look like to center the Black experience in the study and application of interfaith cooperation?”
A central component of the new initiative will be a Black Interfaith Fellows Program. IFYC will recruit a diverse network of fellows (two cohorts for a total of 80 fellows)—representing a wide range of sectors, talents, and perspectives—who are engaged in interfaith bridge-building by means of their lived experience, scholarship, and civic engagement. Through sustained conversation, collaboration, and individual projects, along with multi-platform public engagement and dissemination efforts, the project will inform a more accurate narrative about and by Black interfaith leaders. Assembling knowledge makers from a wide spectrum of religious, cultural, disciplinary, and institutional affiliations, emphasizing the power of public storytelling, and advancing public knowledge through the promotion of original work, the initiative will prioritize engagement strategies that foster a vibrant network of Black interfaith leadership.
Led by the Reverend Frederick Davie, who recently joined IFYC as Senior Advisor for Racial Equity from his former position as Executive Vice President of Union Theological Seminary, the Black Interfaith initiative will also benefit from the guidance of a diverse steering committee, and from anticipated partnerships with the Smithsonian Institution and the American Academy of Religion. It will aim to build a more inclusive interfaith movement, and to bring increased attention to the critical role that interfaith cooperation can play in efforts toward racial equity.
Recommendation: That the Directors of the Henry Luce Foundation approve a four-year grant of $1,000,000 to Interfaith Youth Core to launch and develop a “Black Interfaith” fellowship program.