Acts of Faith

by Eboo Patel

  Kevin and I got off the Red Line at the Fullerton stop. “Do you remember what I said to you here five years ago?” he asked me. “I told you I was dropping out of college, that I was just going to work on my poetry. I asked you if you thought I could make it as a poet.” I remembered. Kevin had just been asked to be part of HBO’s Def Poetry. He had been making his living as a poet—performing on college campuses, teaching workshops at high schools, organizing poetry slams in community centers—for a couple of years now. He was working on a new piece about Chicago, and he wanted to read it to me.

  The people who organized the mayor’s annual Leadership Prayer Breakfast heard about the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC) and invited me to give the Muslim prayer at the event. Somehow, I got seated next to the mayor. “Are you Indian?” he asked. “My daughter just spent six months in Kerala.” For the next twenty minutes, we talked about India. When the waiter came around to pour him more coffee, Mayor Daley said, “No thanks, Oscar.” I stared at him. How did the mayor of Chicago know the name of the guy who pours coffee at the Hilton Towers? He shrugged and said, “He and I went to grade school together.”

  Home. The place where your barber doesn’t have to ask what to do with your hair. Where the music you love came of age. Where the leading citizens fill you with pride. Where your best friend’s dreams are coming true. Where your former students recognize you on the street. The piece of earth that your hands have helped shape.

  Chicago is accustomed to making big dreams into reality. It was on the near West Side of this city that a young Jane Addams created Hull House, a “cathedral of humanity” for recent immigrants that became both a symbol and a laboratory for the inclusion of newcomers into American democracy. A few decades later, on the South Side of Chicago, a brash young leader named Saul Alinsky applied the methods used by labor unions to neighborhoods, building what became known as “community organizations” where common people worked together to demand their due from entrenched business and political elites. And it was here that the first Parliament of the World’s Religions took place, in the year 1893, sparking the interfaith movement in the West. In Chicago’s “make no little plans” spirit, one of the Parliament’s leaders declared, “From now on, the great religions of the world will no longer declare war on each other, but instead on the giant ills that afflict all humankind.”

  Jeff Pinzino, my friend from college, was the first person to introduce the IFYC vision to Chicago. He had led the interfaith Habitat for Humanity project with me in Hyderabad, India, in January 2001 and saw firsthand how service built understanding between people from different religious backgrounds. He returned to Chicago determined to establish a foundation for the IFYC. And as with everything else he’s done, Jeff went about it full force. He quit his job, left Stone Soup (the artists and activists community we had started together in 1997, where he had been living for nearly four years), and started gathering a network of supporters for the IFYC. Jeff laid the groundwork for two IFYC projects that continue today: the Chicago Youth Council (CYC), made up of students from different religions who gather weekly to do service projects and engage in interfaith reflection, and the Day of Interfaith Youth Service, which brings together hundreds of youths from different religions to do a large-scale service project on one day. He financed the operation mostly with his own credit card.

  I spent the first few months of 2002 finishing my dissertation. I passed my oral exams and received my doctorate in June, right about the time that Jeff felt his work with the IFYC was done. He had been offered a job with a foundation that had been impressed by his experience as a community organizer and the entrepreneurial spirit he had shown in building the base of the IFYC in Chicago. It fell to me to pick up on the momentum that Jeff had created. My job was essentially to continue the Chicago Youth Council and Day of Interfaith Youth Service projects; expand our network of relationships to include religious leaders, scholars, and journalists; and secure funding for the organization. I prayed for the day when working for the IFYC would be my full-time job. In the meantime, I took a faculty position at the Urban Studies Program, where I taught courses on religion to students from midwestern liberal arts colleges during a one-semester immersion in Chicago.

  One of the first things I did was to call on Chicago’s senior social movement leaders and intellectuals. For any new movement to be successful, it has to learn from effective movements of the past. Bill Ayers met me at 7:00 a.m. at the Gourmand café in the South Loop and gave me a jewel of advice: “Find the smaller stories that tell the larger story of your movement, and always begin with one of those.”

  I discovered that Martin Marty, one of America’s most important scholars of religion, was speaking at a banquet one night. I bought a $60 ticket, stationed myself outside the banquet hall, and tapped him on the shoulder when he walked by. “Professor Marty, my name is Eboo Patel, and I’m starting an organization called the Interfaith Youth Core based largely on your theories of building religious pluralism,” I said. “I paid $60 for a ticket to this banquet to be able to introduce myself to you. Will you give me a half hour of your time to tell you more?” A few weeks later, we met for an entire afternoon and talked about the importance of religious communities “risking hospitality” with one another. Hospitality became the first shared value for which the Interfaith Youth Core created a curriculum.

  Ron Kinnamon, a former YMCA executive, saw an article about the IFYC in the Chicago Tribune and invited me to have lunch with him. We talked for several hours about the YMCA model of youth leadership development and the changes in America’s religious demographics. “We in America know something about being a Judeo-Christian society, but we know nothing about living in a multifaith society,” he said. “I think it’s going to be young people who lead us into this new reality, and I think I just found the vanguard organization of that movement.”

  Mike Ivers, a former Catholic priest who ran a faith-based organization called Goodcity, saw the IFYC as next in line in the tradition of Chicago social justice movements. “Build the base of your organization here, buddy,” he told me. “Once you get the model right, export it to the world stamped MADE IN CHICAGO.” Goodcity served as a fiscal agent to Christian nonprofits, providing them with the necessary financial structure during their growing years. The IFYC was the first non-Christian organization Goodcity took on. “Interfaith work is Christ’s work,” Mike told his board members, who were a little nervous about the move. “This is the future of the church. This is the future of the city.”

  I visited Marjorie Benton, one of the most forward-thinking philanthropists in America, in her beautiful home in Evanston. “Don’t neglect fundraising,” she told me. “Money is the fuel of strong organizations. The earlier you build a funding base, the easier it will be for you as your organization grows.” She had touched on the single most frustrating aspect of building the IFYC.

  My initial forays into the foundation world had been entirely futile. Most program officers didn’t return my phone calls or e-mails. When I finally set up a few meetings, I discovered how skilled program officers were at telling people no. They listened politely for a few minutes, then asked a set of questions that dealt with issues that were on their minds. For most of them, anything that dealt with religion was passé. They were part of the urban liberal school of thought that expected the Vatican to become Disneyland Rome soon. One told me that I needed a business plan to be taken seriously. Another suggested that I make a video of the programs the IFYC had run in India and South Africa to show to private donors. A third asked how the IFYC was engaging the issue of sexual orientation in our work. A fourth wanted to know whether we had a youth employment strategy.

  None of them really paid attention to the big idea of the Interfaith Youth Core—the dream of young people building religious pluralism. We were immediately put into the box of soft human relations programs, the kind of thing that takes place in a junior high school cafeteria and involves PTA moms and camp songs. “You should ju
st, you know, do local fundraising for your programs,” one foundation person suggested as he ushered me out of his office.

  I had a sudden urge to grab him by his suit jacket and say, “Do you think Osama bin Laden built Al Qaeda on bake sales?”

  After months of frustration, I finally met a foundation person who saw the potential of the IFYC. Zahra Kassam, a young Muslim at the Ford Foundation with a degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, immediately understood the IFYC’s vision and methodology. She asked smart questions about how the IFYC planned to go to scale and measure effectiveness. I sketched out my ideas on both issues, then decided to take a risk. “I feel like people at foundations are always asking questions designed to discourage me,” I said. “Right now, the IFYC is a group of committed young adults who have run several effective interfaith youth projects around the world and are building a set of sustainable programs in Chicago. We would love to tell you we know exactly how to measure and scale our program, but how are we supposed to figure that out until we have the resources to properly run the program in the first place?”

  Zahra was a program associate at the Ford Foundation, one of a group of talented recent college graduates who served primarily as research and support staff for the program officers. But Zahra’s circle of program associates had their own ideas, too. They realized that Ford program officers tended to give grants to people and organizations with which they had some type of personal relationship. In fact, unless you ran a big-name organization, the only chance you had of getting a Ford Foundation grant was by getting the attention of a program officer. That meant either knowing the program officer directly or knowing someone who did.

  The program associates, being younger, were constantly trying to get the program officers they worked for to support the artists and activists from their generation. But because the program officers did not know these people personally, the support rarely materialized. So the program associates approached a vice president at the Ford Foundation and requested their own pot of funding with the intention of making grants themselves. Thus was born the Emerging Voices, New Directions program. In the summer of 2002, Zahra called to tell me that the IFYC was being considered for a $35,000 grant from this fund.

  I knew that this was a make-or-break opportunity for the IFYC, so I did what most nonprofit directors do when they are desperate: I overpromised. For $35,000, I told Zahra, the Interfaith Youth Core could teach a graduate-level course on the theory and practice of interfaith youth work and run a national conference that brought the leaders of various interfaith youth projects from across the country together to discuss best practices. These projects, I told Zahra, were crucial for our nascent field, and the IFYC had the knowledge base and networks to accomplish these tasks.

  When the Ford Foundation grant was finalized, I rejoiced to my friend Joe Hall, and he gave me a golden piece of advice: a grant from a major foundation can be worth three times the amount of the actual check if you leverage it right. Sure enough, as soon as I told foundation program officers in Chicago that Ford was funding the IFYC, they paid attention in a whole new way. In a matter of months, we received grants from the Woods Fund of Chicago and the Chicago Community Trust. After two years of spinning our wheels in the funding world, we raised more than $100,000 in a few months.

  Now we had to get the right team together. Because of my teaching job, I took only a small monthly stipend from the organization for the first year, and Jeff and I set out to look for a full-time staff person. Neither of us had ever hired anybody, and we had no idea what criteria to use or how to go about the process. Thinking about the huge amount of work the IFYC had committed to, Jeff said to me, “Whoever we get better love our mission and never need to sleep.”

  In the end, she came to us. April Kunze had been involved in some of the young adult interfaith gatherings that Jeff had organized when he was first establishing the IFYC in Chicago. She had heard about an interfaith conference in Brazil and called to see if the IFYC could sponsor her to go.

  “I know this is a strange request,” she told Jeff when she called. “I mean, the last time I checked in on the IFYC, you had like $74 in your bank account.”

  Jeff arranged a meeting of the three of us, and one unlikely request was met with another. “Here’s the deal,” I told April. “The IFYC actually has some money now, and we can send you to this conference in Brazil, but there’s one condition: you have to go as our staff member.”

  “I’m not sure I get what you are saying,” she said slowly, looking closely at us to see if we were joking.

  I told her about the Ford Foundation grant, the Chicago-based money that had followed, the huge task we had in front of us.

  “Tell me more about the position you are hiring for,” she said. “What’s the job description?” She fired off a bunch of other questions about the “professional environment” and “opportunities for advancement.” April clearly had more experience in these types of matters than either Jeff or I did.

  We were at a bit of a loss. We hadn’t really thought about any of those things. “Basically,” Jeff told her, “you and Eboo are going to be responsible for running the projects and building the infrastructure of this organization. Eboo’s the executive director, but he’s got a full-time job teaching. So you are going to be carrying a lot of the load.”

  April left an excellent job with a foundation to become the IFYC’s first full-time paid staff person, at 50 percent of her previous salary. It was, I believe, the luckiest break the IFYC has had in its organizational history. April brought an unbelievable range of skills to the IFYC. She created budgets, built bookshelves, wrote grant proposals, ran strategic planning sessions, hired and managed staff (and fired them when she needed to), designed youth programs, and kept spirits up. While I was off giving speeches, April was in the office creating a database to store the names I collected. When the media invitations started to roll in, April suggested devising a plan for how to use the media to build the interfaith youth movement. When I sent her a panicky midnight e-mail about a grant report that I had forgotten about, I got a 5:00 a.m. response saying that she had already turned it in. She is that unique combination of brilliant visionary, team leader, and expert manager—a social entrepreneur in every sense of the word. When young executive directors of new nonprofits ask me for advice, I tell them this: find a number two who complements your skills and whom you would trust with your child. Give him or her anything he or she wants in terms of salary, title, and perks. Your organization can’t survive without that person.

  Even more than April’s skills, it was her heart that made her a perfect fit for the IFYC. She was proud of being an Evangelical Christian, but she was uncomfortable with what that designation had come to mean in contemporary America. She had spent her Minnesota childhood singing praise songs, attending Bible camp, and going on missionary trips to Africa. Her mother had adopted several children out of a conviction that being Christian meant giving what you could to the less fortunate. The Kunze family was far from wealthy, but their home was safe and loving; their form of service was inviting people into it.

  April went to Carleton College and was elected president of the campus Evangelical Christian group. She was on an e-mail list of religious leaders in Minnesota, and one day received a message from a Muslim imam in Minneapolis whose mosque had been burned down in a hate crime. The imam thought it would be a powerful statement if religious communities across Minnesota helped rebuild the mosque. April agreed. She began preparing for her campus group to raise money and volunteer for the effort, but several members rebelled. It was a sign of the divine that the mosque had burned down, they said, because it showed the Muslim community that God was displeased with their “devil worship,” as one member put it. The task of the Christian at this time was to show these people the true path, not to help them rebuild their false shrine.

  April could not believe her ears. She battled back but lost. She was deposed as president of the group. “If t
his is what being part of a Christian group is about, then I don’t want it,” April thought. She kept the light of Christ burning in her heart, but she refused to be involved in anything that had to do with organized Christianity. Instead, she threw herself fully into the work of social justice. When she graduated from college, she moved to Chicago and enrolled in Public Allies, a leadership program in which young people are placed as staff members in urban nonprofit organizations and engage in team-based community development projects. April quickly developed a reputation as a visionary with follow-through in Chicago’s activist circles. She was hired as a senior staff member at a community development organization in one of Chicago’s toughest neighborhoods and went about transforming its youth program, then creating a whole new youth organization called the Crib Collective.

  But she felt that something was missing from her life: a community of faith. She discovered that pursuing social justice with only her private faith was an impossible path. She missed the church, but she was not willing to risk the rejection she had experienced from her fellow Christians when she had reached out to the Muslim community. After hearing Jeff talk about the Interfaith Youth Core, a space that connected faith, social justice, and diversity, she jumped at the chance to get involved. Her problem in the campus-based Christian group had been appearing not Christian enough as a result of her attempt to reach out to Muslims. Now she was worried that she would appear to be too Christian because she firmly believed that Christianity was a uniquely true religion and that Jesus was Lord and Savior. She confessed that worry during our initial interview. “I have the deepest respect for your faith,” I told her. “I sure hope you think it’s true, because otherwise there would be no reason to stay committed to it. I think my religion is true, too. So let’s make a deal. We can both believe our religions are true, we can even privately hope the other converts, and we can work together in this organization to serve others. In that way, we, an Evangelical Christian and a devoted Muslim, can model what we say this organization is about: people from very different faith backgrounds finding common purpose in helping others.”