Youth Lead the Way to Interfaith Action for Development
By Harsha Sharma and Frank Fredericks
From Huffington Post
A child dies every 45 seconds from malaria, a preventable and treatable disease, but what can I do about it?
As young interfaith activists, a Hindu Brit and a Christian American, we’ve been challenged in demonstrating how life in our communities, whether London or New York, can connect to global development efforts.
Making the case for youth in interfaith alone has been a difficult enough challenge. Up until the past decade, youth were little more than a sideshow at interfaith events led by a greying generation. This isn’t to say that religious leaders aren’t important. They are in fact vital to interfaith work. But when religious violence is most often perpetrated by the youth, we should invest our efforts equally in mobilizing them in action.
Yet, interfaith work can entail more than just working towards “peace.” With some of the Millennium Development Goals such as maternal health hardly any closer to achievement than when they started, it’s becoming increasingly clear that tackling issues of global health and poverty won’t be possible without effectively engaging faith communities, particularly the youth.
Effectively engaging religious youth also requires reframing how development organizations view them. Rather than viewing religious youth as a target of such projects, more can be done to view them as an asset to such efforts. This has been a guiding principle for World Faith, which has been mobilizing religious youth locally in the developing world for four years.
For example, Nigeria’s 78 million youth are often identified as actors in violence, leaving hundreds dead in religious clashes. Yet, while the British Council finds that Nigeria needs 25 million jobs over the next 10 years to slow the trend of violence, the youth are often left out of both peace and development efforts. We see this as a global trend, and it’s time to not only engage youth in development, but to value religious youth as an asset in development. Religion plays a critical role in this paradigm, from becoming the source of violence to becoming the inspiration for social action.
But the question remains, can religious youth from the developed world be effectively engaged as an asset to supporting efforts in the developing?
That’s where the Tony Blair Faith Foundation comes in. The Foundation makes the case for faith as a force for good in the modern world. Youth feature centrally in a number of their programmes including the Faiths Act Fellowship — to which we belong as a Fellow and an interfaith coach respectively.
