4

Real World Activism

We may either smother the divine fire of youth or we may feed it.

JANE ADDAMS

Brother Wayne Teasdale had two great hopes for me: that I would start an interfaith youth movement and that I would take mushrooms with him. He got one.

I met Brother Wayne in the spring of 1997. In addition to being a Catholic monk, Brother Wayne had a PhD in philosophy and had spent years at an ashram in India, where he took vows in a Hindu monastic tradition. He was also on the board of the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions, an international interfaith organization based in Chicago.

Brother Wayne fascinated me. He had a head of gray hair but the spirit of an idealistic teenager, easily thrilled and totally devoid of cynicism. He seemed a cross between Don Quixote, Zorba the Greek, Saint Francis of Assisi, and the mad scientist from the Back to the Future movies. “Come see me in Hyde Park,” he said when we met. I jumped at the chance.

He lived in a small apartment in the Catholic Theological Union complex. Books on Christian theology, pictures of Hindu deities, and CDs of Indian classical music were strewn everywhere. Brother Wayne cleared a small place near the window and announced that it was time to meditate. A ticking clock bothered him. I heard him get up to put it away. When we were done meditating, I saw him retrieve it from the freezer.

“Time for a walk,” he said. We pulled on our sweaters and headed south down Cornell Avenue. We passed a dog. Brother Wayne bent down and rubbed the dog’s head. The dog wagged its tail and barked. “That is a very spiritual dog,” Brother Wayne told me as we ambled on. “I know most of the dogs in this neighborhood,” he added.

We continued our walk until we came to a man wearing a heavy winter coat and carrying a black garbage bag with aluminum cans. “Hey, Wayne,” he said. “Ralph, it’s so nice to see you,” Brother Wayne replied. They caught up. Brother Wayne took out his wallet and handed Ralph a twenty. “Ralph is a very spiritual man,” he said. “I know most of the homeless people in this neighborhood.”

We entered a café, ordered, and sat down. A man from outside saw Brother Wayne, waved frantically, and bounded in. “I’ve told you before,” scolded the girl at the counter, “no public restroom.”

He looked at Brother Wayne. Brother Wayne nodded. “Coffee,” the man said triumphantly. “Large,” he said with glee. The man sat down at our table. The girl brought the coffee. Brother Wayne handed over $2. The man launched into a screeching rant about how Mayor Richard Daley was putting poison in the water supply. Brother Wayne listened. “Now, Harold, perhaps you should—” Harold cut him off and started in on the Clinton administration.

I grabbed a newspaper from the next table. Brother Wayne listened some more. We finished our coffee. Brother Wayne and Harold hugged. I offered a polite, somewhat standoffish hand. Harold pumped it. Brother Wayne and I headed back to his apartment. “Harold has a spiritual side, but sometimes it’s hard to see,” Brother Wayne explained. I half expected him to add that he knew most of the raving lunatics in the neighborhood.

Somehow, in between these various encounters, I got the story of why Brother Wayne was interested in me. He was convinced that we were experiencing the interspiritual moment in human history, a time when the great religions of the world would come together to affirm their common values. He wanted more action from the interfaith movement, particularly around environmental issues and freeing Tibet. But after more than a decade of involvement with interfaith organizations, Brother Wayne had lost hope that the existing leaders of the interfaith movement would take bold steps. “They are all very spiritual people,” he explained to me, “but they are afraid of exercising their prophetic voice.” So he had set out to find new blood.

Then he turned to me and said with utter seriousness, “I think you can play a leadership role in the global interfaith youth movement. I can tell you are a very spiritual person.”

“Sure,” I told him. Who can say no to that?

I had been in Chicago for about six months. I had spent the summer after graduating from college traveling around the United States with Sarah. We drove from New York City across to Seattle, down to San Francisco, and then back to Chicago, hiking in national parks, hanging out in the bohemian areas of cities, and volunteering at Catholic Worker houses along the way. Unlike my friends, who despite their radical politics had all locked up jobs before graduating or been accepted to graduate school, I came back to Chicago in mid-August 1996 with a firm commitment to do something good but no concrete plans. I discovered the St. Francis Catholic Worker House on the North Side of the city. All the rooms were taken, but I was welcome to the couch in the front area. Be warned, Ruthie told me, the cats have a proprietary interest in it; the window is drafty; and Jimmy, one of the residents, gets phone calls from his imaginary friends in the middle of the night and argues loudly with them until dawn. It sounded like home to me. I moved in and started looking for a job.

I found exactly what I was looking for: a teaching position at an alternative education program for urban minority high school dropouts on the near northwest side of Chicago. A friend of mine who knew a departing teacher at the school told me they were hiring. I showed up on graduation day, stayed through the ceremony, and sat in a chair outside the school director’s office until she returned. She looked at my résumé, noticed that I had no teaching experience, and pointed out that, at twenty, I would be younger than many of my students. “I will do everything in my power to be an effective teacher here,” I told her. Only one teacher was staying at the school. The school director was desperate, and I guess I was convincing enough to take a chance on.

The school was a program of the Association House of Chicago, a large social service agency inspired by Jane Addams’s Hull House. We were located on North Avenue in between Damen and Western, right on the border between the two gang nations that define growing up in Chicago for too many urban teenagers. The neighborhood, Wicker Park, was fast gentrifying. Streetlights, coffee shops, and vegetarian restaurants were moving in, and working-class people of color were heading west in search of affordable rents.

Called El Cuarto Año, or “the fourth year,” the school was expected to take high school dropouts who read at a fifth-grade level and prepare them to pass the general equivalency diploma, or GED, exam within six months. That would have been an impossible task if our students had an ideal support system. Most didn’t. Many of our male students were involved in gangs, and some had already done stints in the juvenile detention facility. Most of our female students had at least one baby. The vast majority were poor, many were in the process of being uprooted by Wicker Park’s gentrification, and none of them had had good experiences in school. Safety, baby-sitting, basic nutrition, and self-confidence were all issues that had to be addressed along with education.

I was absolutely confident. Had I not read radical education theory? Did I not have deep insights into urban poverty and youth development based on my advanced sociology classes? Was I not the founder of several tutoring programs for elementary school children in my college town? I barely paid attention to any of the discussion in the faculty meetings. I planned to run my classroom my way. When the students started complaining that other teachers were boring and ineffective compared to me, my colleagues would be prepared for me to show them how to be a real ghetto teacher. I figured it would happen by October.

As part of its retention strategy, El Cuarto Año required each student to identify a support person—a parent, an older sibling, a romantic partner. In the meetings I held with prospective students and their support people prior to the beginning of the school year, I spent a good chunk of time explaining that I understood why they had been unsuccessful in school. I emphasized that the system had been designed to fail them. I cited Jonathan Kozol and William Ryan on the chronic underfunding of urban schools due to unfair tax policy. I talked about bell hooks’s theory that the legacy of racism and the odor of colonialism deeply impact the attitude of students of color toward school, which they associate with white supremacy. I assured them that I would be taking a Freireian approach to teaching, using the knowledge base that my students brought into the classroom. And just to put their minds at ease, I confirmed that Ebonics was not only allowed but encouraged in my classroom.

After hearing my lecture, one parent asked, “You’re going to teach my daughter how to read, right?”

I realized that I had skipped that part. In fact, I had hardly thought about it at all. My liberal arts education had provided me with ways to understand what was wrong with the world but few skills to help put it right. My own arrogance had prevented me from seeking effective practical methods of helping urban minority high school dropouts get an education. In a week, I would face a classroom full of challenging students, and I had no idea how to teach them. My confidence quickly gave way to fear.

I became a teacher the hard way: by designing ineffective lesson plans, having my students sneer when I taught them, and working until midnight to adjust the next day’s plan so that I didn’t make the same mistakes as I had the day before. I learned how important it is to start class on time, to demand that all assignments be completed in neat penmanship, and to assign books that both challenged and appealed to my students.

Sometimes I took a break during my midnight lesson-planning sessions and imagined one of my college professors teaching my class. I couldn’t help but laugh at the vision of some of the nation’s leading experts on minority education and urban sociology faced with teaching the students about whom they theorized. Nearly every course I took in college had begun with the professor saying that his or her main goal was to make us “critical thinkers.” I brought that same view to my classroom and spent a lot of time explaining structural racism and the legacy of colonialism.

But my students at El Cuarto Año were experts on inequality. They didn’t need to hear from me that the hand they got dealt was unfair. What they needed was somebody who could teach them basic, useful skills: algebra, reading comprehension, essay composition. Then they would have what my suburban education gave me: the tools to make up my own mind about the world around me. I began wishing that my professors had spent a little more time lecturing on how to constructively engage the world as it is and a little less time teaching me how to criticize it.

More than anything else, I was amazed by how extensively gang violence pervaded my students’ lives. Some of them couldn’t ride the bus or train to school for fear of encountering rival gang members. Others wouldn’t come to school for days at a time because of a gang obligation. “I had an operation,” they would say when they showed up a week later. That was code for being called on by a gang leader to join an organized battle with another gang, sometimes across the street, sometimes across the city.

I remember tutoring Jose after school one day and noticing a perfectly round hole in his jeans. “What’s that?” I asked.

“That’s where I got shot, dog,” he said, pride filling his voice. “It was a battle at Leavitt and LeMoyne, when the Kings used to own that corner.” He showed me the pitchfork he had tattooed on his arm, the sign of the Latin Kings.

“I don’t get it,” I told him. “Are you telling me the same guy who is sitting here reading poetry by William Blake stands on street corners with a gun because of that little sign?”

“You think the school I went to had teachers that stayed after for tutoring sessions? Man, the teachers at that school didn’t even show up half the time. We’d have some stupid sub up there in the front of the room yelling at us to do a worksheet, same damn worksheet yesterday’s sub gave us to do. Since I was six years old, everybody around me be asking ‘What gang you ride? What gang you ride?’ Nobody asked, ‘What poetry you read? What level of math you at?’ One day, you decide you might as well ride something, or else you nobody to no one. So you choose one. Then you hated by half and loved by half. But at least you somebody.”

In early November, I left the St. Francis Catholic Worker House. I had a constant cold as a result of the drafty window, a bunch of scratches on my arm from the cat, and continual sleep deprivation thanks to Jimmy’s late-night conversations with his imaginary friends, which had gotten louder and louder as Jimmy had gotten deafer and deafer. I had met another recent college graduate through activist circles in Chicago, and the two of us found an apartment together.

I was making progress as a teacher. School no longer felt like a battle. My students’ reading and writing skills were improving dramatically. Many did earn their GEDs, several continued their education at local community colleges, and a couple even went directly on to De-Paul University. But it was a lonely existence. I felt as if I was bursting with stories from school and had nobody to tell them to. My $12,000 salary prevented me from being a regular part of the dinner-and-a-show social scene that some of my friends with higher-paying jobs were in. What I really missed was a community, a setup where sharing a story or asking a question was just a walk down the hall away.

On New Year’s Day 1997, I resolved to address the problem directly. I suggested to my roommate that we host a potluck for our generation of activists in Chicago—teachers, social workers, environmentalists, community organizers, whatever. Six people showed up on the first Tuesday in February. I cooked masala potatoes, the only dish I knew how to make (a fact that is, sadly, still true). We talked about typical activist stuff—the gentrification happening in the city, the centrist mode of the Democratic Party—but mostly we exchanged stories and had laughs. We had all gone through the experience of taking a set of ideals we had gathered as undergraduates and trying to apply them in this postcollege life.

“When are we going to do this again?” asked my friend Jeff from Allen Hall, who was working as a community organizer in a Latino neighborhood of Chicago.

“Next week,” I offered.

And so it became a ritual. Every Tuesday I would wake up excited, get home early, cook my potatoes, and wait for my activist friends to start showing up around 7:00 p.m. The numbers grew, from the original six, to their immediate circle of friends, to those people’s circles, and on and on. People on the South Side of Chicago heard about the Tuesday night potlucks and started coming up to the North Side for the vegetarian food and conversation. People had friends at universities in the Midwest, at Michigan and Illinois and Wisconsin, and they dropped by during their spring breaks. By the time the weather got warm, we were spilling out into the front yard. At one point, there must have been eighty people there. They brought poems to share, instruments to play, and news from activists organizing students and workers in out-of-the-way places.

While washing dishes around ten one night, I overheard a conversation behind me. “I live for Tuesday nights,” one person said.

“Me, too,” another said. “This is the only place where I feel people get what I’m about. I wish we could have this energy on a 24-7 basis.”

“You mean live together?” a third asked. “This ain’t the sixties, man. That doesn’t happen anymore.”

I turned around. “Sure it does. Ever heard of the Catholic Worker movement? Their whole thing is based on the idea of people with social justice values living together in community and serving others.”

Our conversation was beginning to attract attention. A couple of people who had graduated from the University of Wisconsin piped in. “It happens in Madison, too. There’s a whole system of cooperatives up there where students and local activists live together, buy food in bulk, share chores, and generally energize each other to do good in the world.” The idea started taking shape.

We decided to ask a senior Chicago activist, Kathy Kelly, founder of an organization called Voices in the Wilderness that opposed sanctions and war on Iraq, to come by the following week and give us some advice on making this idea a reality. Kathy was overjoyed to hear a group of young activists in Chicago talk about forming a social justice community. She told us about a Catholic parish in the Uptown neighborhood with an almost empty convent. Most of the nuns had left, and the priest was considering renting it. We better hurry, Kathy warned us; other people were interested in the building as well.

About six of us were committed to the idea of forming a community. We started meeting every Sunday night to figure out the shape of the project. We put together a mission statement, decided that community decisions would be made by consensus, and crafted a process for admitting new members.

“I love this,” Linda said during one meeting. “We each bring something important and unique to this discussion. Mark and Allie have the experience of living in co-ops in Madison. Eboo and Jeff know about the Catholic Worker movement. It reminds me of my favorite childhood story, about a guy who comes into a starving village with a large pot and a big stone and tells the villagers that he is going to cook them stone soup. He puts water and the stone in a pot, and when it starts boiling, he tastes it and says, ‘It’s almost ready, but it needs some carrots.’ One of the villagers says that he has some carrots, and he runs and gets those. The guy cuts them up, puts them in the pot, and then tastes it again and says, ‘Almost ready. It just needs some celery.’ Somebody else says they’ve got celery and runs and gets it, and the guy cuts it up and puts it in the pot. And on and on with potatoes and turnips and garlic. And then presto—stone soup.”

People were quiet for a moment. The story had struck a profound chord. “I think that’s exactly what we’re about,” Jeff said. “Creating a space that brings out the various talents of a diverse community, and then collecting those talents so that they form something even better that can feed all of us.”

“I think we just got our name—Stone Soup,” John said.

A small group of us went to meet with Father Lambert from Our Lady of Lourdes Parish. We described the mission of Stone Soup and told him that each of us was actively helping others through our professional work. What we were about resonated with him, but he preferred to rent his convent to a religious group. “Are any of you Catholic?” he asked.

Nobody raised a hand.

“Anybody Christian?”

A couple of people said they had been raised Christian.

“Anybody religious?”

Nobody.

He paused for a long time. “Well, your mission certainly has a spiritual core. I am going to get scrutinized for this move by the archdiocese, but I think I’m willing to give it a try.”

Seven of us moved into the Stone Soup Cooperative on Ashland in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago in September 1997. Our membership grew to fifteen that first year. Our Tuesday night potlucks regularly drew fifty-plus people, including some of the most cutting-edge young activists and artists in the city. We were covered by the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Public Radio, and the Chicago Reader (the city’s alternative weekly, which referred to Stone Soup as a community “that smelled strongly of lentils”). Stone Soup started playing a role in neighborhood affairs, especially in doing our best to keep Uptown economically and ethnically diverse. A small group of forward-thinking people started pooling their money, and when, unexpectedly, a large house down the street went on the market, they had several thousand dollars toward a down payment on a site that would become Stone Soup II, the Leland House.

Somebody once asked me for a metaphor to describe Stone Soup, and I said it was the love child of Walt Whitman and Ani DiFranco. It was the most creative group of people I have ever been around, the most fun I have ever had. But there was a part of me that it did not fill. At Stone Soup, we rejoiced in creating ourselves anew every day. The lightness of that was not so much unbearable as unsatisfying. Occasionally, I would think about Sarah in Israel, and I wondered what it might be like to feel the weight of history. I loved my work as a teacher, and I loved the people I was living with, but however I combined community, justice, and creativity, it did not add up to identity.

And that was one of the key reasons I was attracted to Brother Wayne. He might have had his head in the clouds, but he had a very clear sense of his role in the cosmos.

My friend Kevin and I started tagging along with Brother Wayne to various interfaith events. Everywhere he went, Brother Wayne was adored, treated like a holy man rock star. After finishing his talk, Brother Wayne would invite Kevin and me to the stage. “These are the leaders of the next generation, a Muslim and a Jew who are building the interfaith youth movement,” he would say. Then he would move away from the microphone and whisper to us, “Tell them about the interfaith youth movement.”

There were three problems with the position Brother Wayne put us in. First, Kevin and I were uncomfortable with being called a Muslim and a Jew. Actually, we were both trying to be Buddhists. One of the reasons we were drawn to Brother Wayne was his intimate knowledge of Eastern traditions. He was very close friends with the Dalai Lama’s brother and had recently entered into a dialogue with His Holiness himself. Kevin and I wanted him to teach us meditation, chanting, secrets, anything that seemed mysterious. The last thing we wanted was to be boxed into the traditions of our birth. We still harbored an adolescent discrimination against the familiar.

But Brother Wayne didn’t see boxes or borders. He happily taught us meditation techniques and introduced us to Hindu and Buddhist writers. He had spent years studying both traditions, and the encounter with them had served to strengthen his Catholic faith and help him rethink it along the way. He was, after all, a monk who taught at a Catholic seminary, took his vows very seriously, and had received a special honor from Chicago’s archbishop, Francis Cardinal George. The tradition you were born into was your home, Brother Wayne told me, but as Gandhi once wrote, it should be a home with the windows open so that the winds of other traditions can blow through and bring their unique oxygen. “It’s good to have wings,” he would say, “but you have to have roots, too.”

The second problem with the position Brother Wayne put Kevin and me in was that there was no interfaith youth movement, at least none that Kevin and I knew about. We were two twentysomethings in Chicago exploring spirituality, diversity, community, and social justice. That hardly constituted a movement. Still, when Brother Wayne invited us to speak, we would look at each other and shrug and move to the mike. What else could we do but talk? “It’s like free-styling,” Kevin would say later, using a hip-hop term for making the story up as you go along, as long as it contains the truth.

We ended up articulating a zigzag of hopes. Shouldn’t we look at poetry and scripture from different religions and try to find the common pulse of love that ran through them? Shouldn’t we bring young people from radically different backgrounds—rich and poor, Easterner and Westerner, Arab and American—together to build community in diversity? Shouldn’t we follow the lead of Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Joshua Heschel, a Christian and a Jew, who had marched together in Selma, Alabama, for freedom, Heschel even saying, “I felt like my legs were praying”?

People loved our free-styling. We regularly got standing ovations. Teachers would ask us to speak to their classes. Religious leaders wanted us to visit their congregations.

We started to feel a little uncomfortable with the attention. At one point, I made a confession to Brother Wayne: “There really isn’t an interfaith youth movement. Kevin and I are just dreaming out loud.”

He was unperturbed. “Even articulating the hope is helping to make it a reality. Keep praying for it and meeting people who feel like you do, and it will begin to take shape.”

The third problem with going to these events was that they were excruciatingly boring. They were always dinners or conferences with a lot of old people doing a lot of talking. The big goal seemed to be drafting documents declaring that religious people should be dialoguing with each other and then planning the next conference for the document to be reviewed. It was always the same people saying the same things, and still the events went way too long. I remember one especially torturous interfaith dinner in Chicago. By the time the ninth speaker of the evening took the podium, the audience was long past being discreet about looking at their watches and had begun to shift noisily in their seats. The evening had proceeded like most interfaith activities: a couple of hundred people ranging from middle-aged to senior citizen picking at plates of dry hotel food and listening to a long list of speakers repeat the same reasons interfaith activities are important. This speaker, a senior American religious leader, appeared to notice the restlessness and tried to bring new energy to the crowd. In a kind of singsongy shout, he declared, “This is so important what we are doing here. It is interfaith we are doing.” He paused while a look of delight crossed his face. “Yes, interfaith is a doing. It is a verb. Repeat after me,” he said gleefully. “We are interfaithing.”

“Interfaithing,” mumbled about half the audience. The rest stared longingly at the door. Pretending not to notice the halfhearted response, the speaker plowed ahead through the reasons we must continue having annual interfaith banquets. “See you next year,” he said with a satisfied air.

Not only was I bored at these events, but I was also deflated. I wanted so badly to be part of a movement that brought spirituality, diversity, and social action together in a very concrete way. At the heart of every social movement I studied—the civil rights movement, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the movement to free India—had been a group of religiously diverse people putting their skins on the line for social justice. Every leader I admired was deeply rooted in a different faith. I could not understand why the people at the interfaith events I attended seemed so thrilled that Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Christians, and Muslims had all gathered at one conference. My high school lunch table had had at least as much diversity. It baffled me that so much energy was spent on writing documents and creating interfaith ceremonies and positioning people onstage ever so carefully so that the photographs could come out looking like a Benetton ad. Where was the concrete commitment to social action, the stuff that our faith heroes had been about? And where were the young people?

Kevin and I were about fed up with interfaith events when we got a phone call from Charles Gibbs, the executive director of the United Religions Initiative (URI), an international interfaith organization based in San Francisco. Brother Wayne had told Charles that the interfaith movement had to involve more young people and that Kevin and I were building an interfaith youth movement in Chicago. Charles was calling to invite us to the URI’s Global Summit. He gave us full scholarships to the conference and told us that there were going to be young people there from around the world who were interested in being part of the interfaith youth movement.

The URI had been formed in the mid-1990s by William Swing, then the Episcopal bishop of the diocese of California. The big idea was that interfaith work needed to include not just high-level religious leaders but also people at the grass roots, and that there had to be concrete, ongoing interfaith activities and not just international conferences. The job of a global organization would be to network various local interfaith groups and coordinate their activities.

The URI Global Summit was held at Stanford and was attended by people from several dozen countries around the world. The under-thirties skipped a lot of the conference sessions to spend time together. We had come from Malaysia, Ghana, Brazil, Argentina, and the United States. We were Hindus, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Baha’is, Buddhists, and practitioners of indigenous religions. In the discussions of our faith lives, two themes stood out: our faith formation had occurred in the midst of religious diversity, and serving others was a core part of how we lived our religions. A young Hindu woman called herself a “karma yogi,” someone who seeks God through the path of actively serving others. Kevin talked about the connection between the Hindu call to service and the Jewish command of tikkun olam, repairing the world. A Malaysian Christian quoted from Matthew 25 and said that this is exactly what Jesus was about. I couldn’t help but think of the conversation I had had with my parents about volunteering and their insistence that I serve because it was part of Islam.

The discussions went long into the night, and by the time I got back to my room, I was exhausted. But I couldn’t sleep. It was a rare space that we had created at that conference: an open conversation about faith, diversity, and service. In other spaces, I had experienced pieces of these conversations, but never all the parts together. In college, I had been part of a lot of service learning efforts that brought people from diverse backgrounds together to build houses or tutor children, but we had never talked about faith. At Catholic Worker houses, there was much discussion of faith and service, but little talk of religious diversity. Thus far, my experience in the interfaith movement had included plenty of faith and diversity, but little attention to concrete service.

I was afraid that space would evaporate with the goodbye hugs at the end of the conference. How to continue it? I racked my brain late at night thinking about that. And suddenly, an idea hit me: what if we created a project where religiously diverse young people came together for one year in a residential community where they would live together and take part in community service projects? There were a number of faith-based efforts along these lines—Jesuit Volunteer Corps, Lutheran Volunteer Corps, and a parallel Jewish volunteer program called Avodah. They connected faith and service but had no religious diversity. Moreover, there were programs like City Year, Teach for America, and Public Allies that deliberately brought people from different races, classes, genders, and geographic backgrounds together to engage in community development efforts (although they were generally not residential programs), but faith was largely ignored. And then there was the interfaith movement, where people from different religious backgrounds came together, but they seemed intent on focusing on organizing conferences, curating ceremonies, and drafting documents. An Interfaith Youth Corps would learn from all of these efforts while creating something genuinely new.

It was about three in the morning. Four more hours, and I would be able to tell other people about this.

Ideas become reality when the right people commit to them. There are two categories of the “right people”—mentors and peers. Mentors are people with resources, networks, and wisdom. They guide you, encourage you, and connect you. In One Day, All Children . . ., Wendy Kopp describes the various mentors who helped launch Teach for America. The chair of Princeton’s sociology department, Marvin Bressler, immediately saw the potential of the idea. He set up a meeting with Princeton’s director of development so that Wendy could learn about fundraising. The director of development agreed to have Princeton act as Teach for America’s fiscal agent. Richard Fisher, a fellow Princeton alum and the CEO of Morgan Stanley, gave Wendy a sympathetic ear and free office space. The founders of City Year, Michael Brown and Alan Khazei, provided ongoing strategic advice, including the all-important counsel “Just say no” when other people ask you to change your mission even a tiny bit. The little things made a big difference. Wendy writes about a corporate executive who called her and said, “Wendy, I just read your proposal. It’s stunning.” That phone call energized her for a week.

Thankfully, the URI Global Summit was a world of friendly mentors. Charles Gibbs had watched the young people sneak out of conference sessions with a twinkle in his eye. When I cornered him at breakfast with the idea of the Interfaith Youth Corps, he said, “I was wondering what you all were cooking up.” Jim Kenney, a longtime supporter of youth participation in interfaith work, listened intently to the idea and suggested a practical next step: that different interfaith organizations contribute money to a youth conference where the details could be further discussed. Joe Hall, a conference participant who came from a community development and arts background, spent an entire afternoon with me discussing how to make this idea happen. He gave me exactly what I needed at the time: his belief that the Interfaith Youth Corps idea was both powerful and possible, and his counsel that anger-based activism goes only a fraction of the distance that compassion-based approaches do.

Even more important than the support of mentors, I needed the companionship of my peers. I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t crazy when I said that young people desired a space to connect faith, diversity, and service and that my initial sketch for an Interfaith Youth Corps met that need. Wendy Kopp writes that throughout all the early trials of creating Teach for America, her most important connection was to her peers who were committed to educational equality in America. I felt the same love from my peers at the Global Summit. “That’s exactly what our generation needs to be about,” said my friend Parthi, a Malaysian Christian. “Yeah, man, make that thing happen,” said Socrates, an African Traditionalist from Ghana. Our conference discussions began focusing on the shape of this project. As the end of the conference loomed, a big question hung in the air: who would do what when we all scattered back home? I repeated the offer made by Jim Kenney and Charles Gibbs to help fund an interfaith youth conference and committed to take the lead on it. Other people stated what they could do. I left the conference with an idea, a burning passion, and a group of mentors and peers ready to making it a reality.

Kevin and I went to see Brother Wayne about the Interfaith Youth Corps as soon as we got back to Chicago. He could barely contain himself as we described it. When he finally calmed down, he started plotting strategy. “Well, after the corps frees Tibet, it can start working on the environment. Those are the two biggest crises of our time, and their causes are spiritual. The solutions have to be spiritual, too.”

He was quiet for a moment. “You know who will want to hear about this?” he suddenly said. “His Holiness.” He stood up abruptly, pointed his finger in the air, and proclaimed, “You have to go to Dharamsala and tell His Holiness about the Interfaith Youth Corps. You have to get his blessing before you do anything else.”