After the 2025 Interfaith Leadership Summit, Interfaith America invited educators who attended to apply for IA’s Supporting Student Leadership Grants.
Through these grants, campuses across the country are implementing interfaith and bridgebuilding projects with the aim of equipping and empowering students.
Harnessing learnings and skills cultivated at the Summit, educators have already begun implementing projects that engage student leaders.
Organized by a diverse array of institutions — including large public universities, private and faith-based institutions, women’s colleges, and globally recognized research universities — projects represent a spectrum of approaches to student leadership development, including collaboration with other campuses and engagement with community organizations.
A project at George Washington University (GWU) in Washington, D.C. used funds to launch an Undergraduate Interfaith Advisory Board within their Center for Interfaith and Spiritual Life and host an Interfaith Week, with plans to carry out a community engagement initiative this spring.
“By centering student leadership,” wrote Simran Kaur-Colbert, director of GWU’s Center for Interfaith & Spiritual Life, these initiatives “empower undergraduates to foster empathy, belonging, and connection across difference.”
Agnes Scott College, a private women’s liberal arts institution in Decatur, Ga., is using Supporting Student Leadership funding to pursue a collaboration between the campus’ Interfaith Coalition and democratic engagement coalition, exploring the intersection of interfaith and public policy through educational events.
“The project also encompasses the campus commitment to preparing students to be change makers in the world through engagement with nonprofits and community groups who are doing the work of pluralism in the area,” Agnes Scott chaplain, the Rev. Sarah Hooker, explained in her project proposal.
With funding from the Supporting Student Leadership Grant, Grand Valley State University’s Kaufman Interfaith Institute hosted their annual Made-In-Michigan Interfaith Leadership Lab earlier this month.
This two-day event brought together interfaith student leaders from campuses across Michigan to build statewide interfaith partnerships and practice bridgebuilding strategies together.
In opening remarks for the event, Dr. Sarah Montgomery Richards, assistant director for faculty at GVSU, addressed participants. “Rooted in pluralism,” she said, “this lab invites us to stay in relationship across differences, trusting that how we listen and learn together shapes the kind of Michigan we are building.”
The 2026 Supporting Student Leadership Grant Cohort includes grantees from the following institutions:
- George Washington University
- Augsburg University
- California State University
- Grand Valley State University’s Kaufman Interfaith Institute
- William Paterson University of New Jersey
- Agnes Scott College
- Oberlin College
- Loyola University Maryland
- Alvernia University
- Harvard University
- Greenville University
- Baylor University
