February 2022 Resource Roundup

Our monthly Shoulder to Shoulder Community & Congregational Network Call is an opportunity to convene and connect with interfaith and community organizations and leaders throughout the country who are, in some capacity, addressing anti-Muslim discrimination in the U.S. In our meetings, members share resources, problem solve, and reflect on this important work. The notes below are a selection of public resources and events shared by network members and our various partners and friends. If you’re interested in learning more about our S2S Community Network, contact us and/or check out our website.

Shoulder to Shoulder Programmatic Updates:

• Youth & Young Adult Virtual Summit on addressing religious discrimination — 80 people registered and over 50 people attended.
• Spring 2022 Messaging Campaign This spring, for the first time in more than three decades, followers of several faiths will observe their religious holidays at the same time. In April this includes the celebrations of Ramadan, Passover, Easter, Vaisakhi, Mahavir Jayanti, Theravada New Year, and the Gathering of Nations. This means that Muslims, Jews, Christians, Baha’is, Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists, and Indigenous nations will all be practicing their significant religious and cultural traditions around the same time. This convergence is an important opportunity to remind our communities yet again, of the interconnectedness of our communities and a chance to recommit to our highest ideals for creating and caring for communities where everyone is treated with dignity, respect, and fairness.
• Spring 2022 Messaging Guide outlines topline messaging suggestions, tips for writing your own opinion piece, and for having it placed in your local news outlets. This guide can also be used to shape newsletters, blogs, public speeches, and sermons.
• Join Shoulder to Shoulder for an Opinion Writing Workshop led by ReThink Media on Friday, March 11th at 1:00pmET to learn how to write an effective op-ed piece. For more information and link to register, click here: https://www.shouldertoshouldercampaign.org/events/2022/3/11/spring-messaging-campaign-opinion-writing-workshop

Resources & Upcoming Opportunities shared from various partners, friends, and leaders in the field:

If there’s something you’d like to see added in future resource roundups, please let us know! Email Cassandra at info@s2scampaign.org

Events:

• Women’s History Month with an Auburn Seminary workshop on identifying and disrupting common myths about Muslim-American women, by uplifting and celebrating Muslim women activists, entrepreneurs, and social justice leaders. Find out how to support an array of Muslim-led movements for social justice and build authentic connections across faith communities. Tuesday, March 1, 2022, from 6–7:30 PM https://auburn-tvuds.formstack.com/forms/disrupting_myths_and_celebrating_muslim_american_women
• The Center for Security, Race, and Rights invites you to a public lecture by Professor Edward Curtis IV on his book Muslims of the Heartland: How Syrian Immigrants Made a Home in the American Midwest The online lecture will take place on March 8 at 12 pm eastern time, and free registration here. To register for CLE credit, please click here.
• From Problem to Promise: Reframing Social Issues March 24, 12:00–1:30 pm | More Information & Registration | The world is in profound need of healing. Headlines are filled with critical issues which demonstrate our brokenness — racism, climate change, police brutality, voting rights, sexism, gun violence, health care access, affordable housing, white supremacy, LGBTQ equity and inclusion, reparations, and treaty rights to name just a few. How do we, as spiritual people, engage these issues as opportunities to deliver on promises that reflect our deepest spiritual values and commitments? Join a lively conversation with Rev. Dr. Steve Newcom, founding director of the Kaleo Center for Faith, Justice and Social Transformation, on Thursday, March 24 at noon. Steve will provide a brief overview of Sevenfold, a model of social transformation which reframes our work for justice from problems to be solved to the Promises we Serve. Sevenfold integrates seven dimensions of social transformation into a user-friendly framework designed to deepen our understanding of what is really going on and strategically align action for transformational impact. | Event Sponsors: Minnesota Multifaith Network (MnMN) and Kaleo Center for Faith, Justice and Social Transformation
• Tri-Faith Initiative and the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO)’s Department of Religious Studies are pleased to announce the first annual Race, Religion, and Social Justice (RRSJ) Conference, which will be held on Thursday, June 9, 2022 on the Tri-Faith Commons in Omaha, NE. The RRSJ Conference will advance interdisciplinary knowledge focused on the intersections of race, religion, and social justice by bringing a diverse group of interdisciplinary scholars; diversity, equity, access, and inclusion (DEAI) practitioners; community and civic leaders; and corporate executives together to spark cross-sector collaboration in the Midwest. This year’s theme is Harm, Healing, and Hope. They are seeking papers and presentations for this conference that address topics associated with Harm, Healing, and Hope.
• Compassionate Integrity Training (CIT) delivered by Compassionate Houston. The training imparts 10 skills and tools to cultivate compassion at the individual, interpersonal, and organizational/systems levels based on cutting-edge developments in many fields relevant to compassion (e.g. psychology, conflict resolution, etc.). CIT is endorsed and used by Karen Armstrong’s Charter for Compassion and UNESCO’s Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainability. More about CIT and its Three-in-Three Educational Model is at this link.

Grants/Fellowships/Jobs

• “Islam on the Edges” is an intentional effort to shift focus away from assumed centers of the Islamic world to better understand the global nature of Islam. The Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University (CGIS) and CICW are initiating a new collaborative project with this call for contributions that will showcase the thematic diversity of “Islam on the Edges” via the AVACGIS open access digital scholarship platform, Maydan. Accepted submissions published on the Maydan will receive an honorarium of $200. Please see below for information regarding the submission process. This collaboration will also involve a diverse set of scholarly gatherings and output over the next year. https://themaydan.com/2022/01/edges/
• The Black History Month SMS Grant will award 10 orgs with up to 100,000 texts to support base and power-building work. And at the end of the texting campaign, recipients will get a list of 1,000s of supporters to follow up with and bring closer to their movement. You can apply at bit.ly/BHMSMSGRANT. Applications close Feb. 27th!
• Registration remains open for the BAMEMSA (Black, African, Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian) Leaders Coaching Circle until Friday, March. 5th. The Coaching Circle, which launches on March 10th, is a 3 month program that will provide a supportive environment for nonprofit Black, African, Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian (BAMEMSA) leaders* to dig deep into their personal and collective wisdom around sustaining and growing their leadership. This coaching circle is unique because it focuses entirely on BAMEMSA leaders, enabling them to bring their full identities to the space and be validated and celebrated.
• El Hibri Foundation is seeking nominations for community leaders who promote inclusion and collaboration in their communities. Nominations are open TODAY through March 15, 2022. Who do you want to see recognized for their leadership and work? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLsOIFE0rfw
• RAC Teen Justice Fellowship: The fellowship is a learning-intensive designed to train Jewish high schoolers to be organizers in their home communities. As a fellow, you’ll learn community organizing skills, why voter suppression is still a problem, how to run a virtual voter registration drive, and complete a civic engagement project in your home community. You get to learn, decide how you want to make an impact and be the leader that makes it happen. High schoolers can learn more and apply for the Spring Cohort by March 15th.
• The Center for Inclusion and Belonging at the American Immigration Council is issuing a Call for Bridging Communities Projects to crowdsource the best ideas and activities in use across the United States that bring people together to work toward the common good while building relationships that help bridge-group differences. Submissions should be about projects you are already putting into practice, not just ideas. An honorarium will be paid to the 10 highest ranked ideas (top idea receives $1,000, 2nd and 3rd each get $500, and the other seven will receive $250). In addition, if your idea fits our criteria (and you are part of a non-profit organization), you may be invited to apply for a $75,000 fellowship opportunity run by the Center for Inclusion and Belonging (CIB). The deadline to submit is March 15, 2022. More information:​​https://inclusion.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/content/open-call-bridging-communities-projects
• The Religion, Spirituality, and Democratic Renewal (RSDR) Fellowship of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) aims to bring knowledge of the place of religion and spirituality into scholarly and public conversations about renewing democracy in the United States. These fellowships are offered by the SSRC Program on Religion and the Public Sphere with the support and partnership of the Fetzer Institute. Applications are due April 14, 2022, 5 p.m. Eastern time. https://www.ssrc.org/programs/religion-and-the-public-sphere/religion-spirituality-and-democratic-renewal-fellowship/
• Advancing Justice-ALC is currently looking to hire a Policy Director to oversee our policy priorities and advocacy on local, state, and federal issues impacting low-income AAPI and AMEMSA communities. We would appreciate it if you could share the job listing with anyone in your network who might be interested. Job Listing: Policy Director Deadline: March 18th
• The Family and Youth Institute (The FYI) is hiring! We are a 501(c)3 not-for-profit research and education institute dedicated to strengthening young people and their families. Detailed job descriptions are available here. Please forward resume as well as questions to jobs@thefyi.org We currently have 4 positions available: Marketing Communications Manager (FT); Community Outreach Specialist (PT); Grant Manager (PT); Project Manager (PT)
• Over Zero is currently hiring for an exciting new position — a Director of Training & Education

Resources:

• PODCAST | South Dakota Voices for Peace Cohorts of Courage Youth Advocates have been busy with their podcast — In The Know. Take a listen to hear their perspective on issues and change opportunities. https://open.spotify.com/show/0oFFpNjQOIpP56BGv19EFR
• Teaching Beyond 9/11 by the University of Pennsylvania’s Global Engagement Office with support from Penn’s Graduate School of Education and the Penn Libraries has three new modules focusing on media representation.
• You Truly Assumed, by Laila Sabreen, is about the activism of three teenage Black Muslim women as they navigate islamophobia and grow as activists.
• SolidarityIs has a new website where you can find resources such as the social change ecosystem framework, the Solidarity Is This podcasts, and information about training opportunities including Solidarity Semester and the Power Up Internship Program. Shoulder to Shoulder has hosted workshops with the SolidarityIs team and they will lead a workshop at our Youth and young adult summit.

Closing

From John Paul Lederach, Reconcile: Conflict Transformation for Ordinary Christians.

The journey towards reconciliation calls us to embrace the paradox. Caught as we are between the realities we see around us and the dreams we have, we must not choose one over the other. To move toward reconciliation, we must keep our feet on the ground, connected to the pulse of real life challenges, and our heads in the clouds, with a dream that things can be different.

In Colombia they have a saying: “You must be so close to the ground that you can hear the grass grow.” This is our challenge: to stay so close to the ground that we feel the very soil’s moisture bubbling up from people’s daily life, pains, and realities. Yet we must be so close to our dreams of what could be that we can feel and hear the seeds pregnant with life as they break forth from below the surface.

Faith beckons us to join the cloud of witnesses. We are invited to join people having a practical commitment to face the challenges of their day, and simultaneously, the courage to dream about what could and should be.