Philanthrocapitalism_ How Giving Can Save the World - Matthew Bishop [40]
The Interfaith Youth Core is unique in its efforts to bring young people of diverse religions together to better understand each other’s faiths and their own as testaments of peace that can prevent group hatred and violence before they arise. Founded by Dr. Eboo Patel, a thirty-one-year-old Indian-American Muslim from Chicago, the Interfaith Youth Core seeks not to dilute but to strengthen and deepen young people’s religious convictions while helping them gain greater knowledge of the beliefs of others, identify values they have in common, and express those values through cooperation in community-service projects. Before the service work begins, the Core gives young people the opportunity to discuss with others how the scriptures, stories, rituals, and heroes of their respective faiths lead them to serve. Every year in April, the Core sponsors Days of Interfaith Youth Service in which young people come together on college campuses and in their hometowns to do community service and engage in dialogue. In 2006, more than fifty cities around the world participated.
Over the course of seven years, 10,300 young people on five continents have participated in Interfaith Youth Core programs. Since 2003, the Core has trained 770 organizers to develop and lead their own independent service programs, which have involved thousands of others around the world. If the old adage about an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure is correct, the Interfaith Youth Core is a good place to start.
Women play a unique role in most reconciliation efforts and in dealing with other problems that require new beginnings, like trafficking in women and girls, human rights abuses, and the use of children as soldiers. Indeed, a persuasive case can be made that if women were equal participants in every aspect of a nation’s life, many of these problems would not occur in the first place.
In 1997, following up on her assertion two years earlier, at the Fourth U.N. Conference on Women in Beijing, that “women’s rights are human rights,” Hillary and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright established the Vital Voices Democracy Initiative to promote the advancement of women’s rights as an explicit goal of U.S. foreign policy. Over the next three years, at conferences throughout the world, Vital Voices brought together thousands of women leaders from eighty countries. They included Catholic and Protestant women working together for peace in Northern Ireland; Muslim, Croatian, and Serbian women committed to peace in Bosnia; and African women lobbying to end female genital mutilation in their countries. In 2000, American women who were involved in the government initiative and who wanted the project to continue formed a new nongovernmental organization, Vital Voices Global Partnership, and aligned with other women around the world who began their own chapters.
Vital Voices invests in emerging women leaders to give them the tools they need to advance peace and reconciliation, run successful businesses, participate fully in their nation’s political life, and combat trafficking in women and girls and other abusive practices. Vital Voices began working with women in Afghanistan, where the Taliban was particularly repressive to women and girls. With the Taliban shackles thrown off, the group is supporting Afghan women’s right to full participation in the country’s reconstruction, preparing them to be active in politics, civil society, and income-generating activities, and in making sure that Afghan girls have access