Highlights from the Inspired to Serve Site in Chicago

Convened by Interfaith Youth Core

Chicago is the birthplace of the interfaith youth service-learning movement and the Interfaith Days of Youth Service. The Inspired to Serve project sought to seed new, grassroots networks of faith-based organizations to engage in interfaith service-learning across the city. Coordinators provided technical assistance and training for each local partnership or network.

Accomplishments

The Human Rights Awareness Group, composed of teenagers from the Jewish Reconstructionist Center of Evanston and students from the Islamic Foundation School deliberately involved artistic, civic, and community organizations that deal with various aspects raising awareness around human rights issues, including migration, discrimination and war crimes. They interviewed survivors of the Holocaust and Sierra Leone’s civil war and spent time with the staff at the Chicago Freedom Museum.
The human rights project set the stage for Jewish and Muslim youth deciding to hold a joint screening and dialogue of a documentary on the peace movement in Israel and Palestine, which helped to diffuse tensions in the community during a period of violence in the Middle East.
The youth leading a Lead Poisoning project, formed committees, created timelines and benchmarks, worked on media and expansion of the Lead Poisoning project that was initiated as part of Inspired to Serve.
With support from the Inspired to Serve project, the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs and Imagine Englewood If moved from an informal to formal partnership that involve running joint summer programming related to interfaith, intercultural, and interracial service-learning.
Poetry Pals group, which works with fourth and fifth graders, organized field trips to a Catholic church and a Muslim mosque, where the students interacted with priests, nuns and imams.

Stories

Caring for the Environment

Guided by a youth steering committee, more than 100 high school youth from many faith traditions worked with local community members, the Chicago Parks Department, and Openlands to clean, beautify, and preserve Humboldt Park and dialogue on their shared value of caring for the environment. In the process, they learned from the Parks Department about the issues and challenges of maintaining an urban park. Youth recorded their hopes and contributions to the environment on leaves of a cloth tree which now hands in the Interfaith Youth Core office.

Learning to Listen

Youth leaders brainstormed areas of social concern that they wanted to learn more about during a Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Community Listening Project. They selected the environment, education, immigration, and health care. Community activists knowledgeable in these fields were invited to share their time and experience with MLK Day participants. The youth leaders discussed the concept of “listening” within their respective faith traditions and prepared a speech highlighting listening as a shared value. On MLK Day, youth leaders welcomed participants with their speech. After a time of learning about faith heroes and interviewing community activists, youth made recommendations for future service-learning projects.