After the recent presidential election, divisiveness can seem like an ongoing and intractable obstacle in American life. Students on college campuses across the U.S. are leading innovative new projects aimed at engaging, not inflaming, differences.
Interfaith America is helping to fund and encourage that student energy and dedication with our new Strengthening the Campus Community Grants.
The Strengthening the Campus Community Grant opened for applications the day after the November 2024 election and now has funded 31 grantee campuses for work this spring. The focus of the grant is to support university and college-based projects that encourage and engage undergraduate students in work across religious and ideological lines.
In light of one of the most polarizing elections in American history, these grants hoped to, as our partner at Baldwin Wallace College, Kerry Mullen, Director of Residence Life so aptly described her own project, “help students think beyond their immediate circumstances, and to see themselves as part of a larger community and as agents of positive change.”
The grantee campuses, and their project teams, represent a cross-section of American higher education, with public universities, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), religiously-affiliated universities, and private research universities all represented. From Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas (with around 800 students) to UCLA in Los Angeles, California (with 33,000 undergraduate students), these projects are committed to positively engage our differences with skills, nuance, and understanding.
The range of the projects also offers an exciting variety of approaches to building bridges on campus. At Miami University in Miami, Ohio, the Interfaith Center is harnessing students’ natural use of their smartphones to create an arts and dialogue project around what bridgebuilding looks like to them. The Interfaith Center recruited a diverse set of students to be trained in basic smartphone photography techniques and provided them with a prompt to “compose photos of their experiences of the bridges and barriers to belief and belonging on campus.” Once these photos are compiled and exhibited for the campus, the Interfaith Center will convene a day of dialogue to highlight what these visual narratives can offer all students as they engage with others.
Other projects are led directly by students and engage their local community directly. At Hendrix College in central Arkansas, student Neil Dogra is leading the interfaith group there in a series of dialogues and events focused on educating his fellow students about different faith traditions represented on campus and in the community. He’s also providing inclusive service opportunities that help a diverse set of students make an impact in their region. Hendrix is a southern campus rooted in the Methodist church, but welcoming of an increasingly diverse student body, and Neil wanted a project that was “action-based while allowing us to bridge divides, nurture understanding, and create a community rooted in unity amidst diversity.”
No matter what part of the country a campus is in or what form their initiatives take, each of these projects is trying to engage in the difficult, but essential, work of bridgebuilding. Student energy and leadership is at the base of all of these projects. It’s “the student-centered nature of the project that is making it so positive,” Professor Holly Hillgardner, a faculty member at Bethany College in West Virginia shared. Indeed, these grants help demonstrate that students, faculty, and staff are meeting the moment in these tumultuous times.
Interfaith America is proud to fund Strengthening the Campus Community Grantees at the following institutions:
Baldwin Wallace
Belmont University
Bethany College (Kansas)
Bethany College (West Virginia)
Brigham Young University
California State University East Bay
California State University, Bakersfield
Cornell University
Drew University
Franklin and Marshall College
Georgetown University
Greater Portland Hillel
Hendrix College
Hillel of San Luis Obispo
Institute for Multipartisan Education
Kennesaw State University
Keuka College
Lane College
Miami University (Ohio)
Michigan State University
Plymouth State University
Randolph College
Rhodes College
Siena College
Texas A&M University
Trevecca Nazarene University
University of California, Los Angeles
University of South Carolina
University of St. Thomas
Wayne State University
