Interfaith Youth Core

Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC) is a Chicago-based non-profit founded in 2002 by Eboo Patel. The organization’s stated mission is to make interfaith cooperation a social norm. Today it operates with approximately 30 full-time staff and a $4-million budget. It has worked on five continents and with over 200 college campuses domestically.

IFYC officially launched its operations at the 1999 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Cape Town, South Africa, under the direction of Patel and organizers Anastasia White and Jeff Pinzino. At the time, Patel was finishing up his doctorate in the sociology of religion at Oxford University, so Pinzino spearheaded much of IFYC’s early organizational growth. Upon completing his doctorate in 2002, Patel took over as executive director. A $35,000 grant from the Ford Foundation enabled IFYC to run its first conference of interfaith leaders and teach a graduate-level course on the methodology of interfaith work. Since then, the organization has coordinated the Chicago Youth Council, a group of eight student interfaith leaders, Days of Interfaith Youth Service, and the Fellows Alliance, a year-long fellowship that trained student interfaith leaders on individual campuses. Patel discuses the genesis of IFYC in-depth in his memoir, Acts of Faith Today the organization reaches college students through its Interfaith Leadership Institutes (ILIs) and the Better Together Campaign.

IFYC identifies a divisive public conversation about religion as a major problem facing America today. The organization seeks to promote a different narrative that instead emphasizes cooperation among different religious and secular communities. IFYC works to foster what it calls a “critical mass” of interfaith leaders on college campuses that will later craft and drive this dialogue of interfaith cooperation.

Based on the work of Diana Eck’s Pluralism Project, IFYC identifies three core components of interfaith cooperation: respect for religious identity, mutually inspiring relationships, and common action for the common good. In the first component, individuals create a space where each feels comfortable sharing his or her faith identity, and engaging with others’ religious perspectives. Such a space enables individuals to identify values shared by many religious and secular traditions, such as justice, mercy and compassion. By establishing appreciative relationships, IFYC’s methodology encourages individuals to collaborate across faith traditions on service projects that speak to these commonly held values.

Better Together and Interfaith Leadership Institutes (ILIs)

The Better Together Campaign is IFYC’s model for an interfaith action campaign on college campuses nationally. The campaign is designed to function in a variety of campus environments while allowing students to adapt it to their own community. Under the current campaign model, students begin by deciding upon an important social issue in their community (hunger, poverty, public health, etc.) around which to focus interfaith service work. The model then offers students several events they may choose to run on campus:

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