Higher Education
The Inspiring Campus Change Grants provide opportunities for colleges and universities to promote religious pluralism and to create welcoming environments for people of diverse religious, secular, and spiritual identities.
Applications Closed
April 4, 2024
The Inspiring Campus Change Grant provides opportunities for institutions of higher education to promote religious pluralism and to create welcoming environments for people of diverse religious, secular, and spiritual identities. The goal is to help campuses engage constructively with people of diverse religious backgrounds and divergent ideologies, and to model what it means to live and thrive in a diverse democracy.
Interfaith America seeks partnerships with campuses who recognize that American colleges and universities have a unique role and responsibility to strengthen American pluralism, creating spaces and opportunities for people to gather purposefully and engage cooperatively across difference. With the Inspiring Campus Change Grants, colleges and universities will develop more comprehensive interfaith infrastructures, practices, and strategies to enable administrators, faculty, staff, and students engage across lines of religious differences and contribute to a sustainable and thriving democracy.
Informing the work of grantees will be the Interfaith, Spiritual, Religious, and Secular Campus Climate Index, or INSPIRES Index. Drawing on findings from IDEALS research, the Index measures and evaluates an institution’s efforts to create a welcoming climate for people who orient around religion differently. Grant recipients will use data from the Index to develop context-specific projects that will enhance their institutions’ efforts to promote religious pluralism and interfaith learning. These projects will need to address at least two of the following seven dimensions included in the INSPIRES Index:
TOOLS
The Interfaith, Spiritual, Religious, and Secular Campus Climate Index is an assessment tool that measures, evaluates, and represents an institution’s efforts towards, and commitment to, establishing a welcoming climate for students of different worldview identities.
Tools
Campus climate assessment is an important first step in determining how to support religious diversity and foster interfaith cooperation on campus.
Research
How do students make meaning of their worldview identities? And, importantly, how do college students meaningfully engage across lines of worldview difference?
Tools
The INSPIRES inventory evaluates your campus on the following seven metrics. Please check out our resources for driving campus change in each of the seven areas.
Please reach out with questions about the grant or eligibility.
Bex Blackburn
Program Operations Manager
Interfaith America
Pluralism looks to build bridges where others seek to widen divides.
— Eboo Patel
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