By Stasia Raebel, ’24

Working with the Center for Interfaith Cooperation has been an incredibly meaningful experience. I was involved in many events that brought our community together. From sharing food with others from various backgrounds, sharing prayers from different faith paths, and coming together to hear music and watch diverse dances from multiple traditions, this experience allowed me to collaborate with new people and help bridge connections across several faiths.

The Festival of Faiths, hosted in downtown Indianapolis every September, brought over 50 different faith traditions from central Indiana together for a celebration. This was a great start to my internship, and I enjoyed speaking with people from faiths that I had little knowledge about before my internship. This experience definitely helped me grow my religious literacy.

In addition, I had the wonderful opportunity to participate in Sacred Space tours. Through this, I would go to various places of worship in the Indianapolis community. Each faith welcomed us into their space with open arms, and it was a great educational opportunity to learn more about their beliefs and how they practice their religions. Some of these visits also included sharing a meal and diving into their faith celebrations, such as a Diwali celebration with the Hindu Temple of Central Indiana. These experiences widened my perspectives and made me eager to interact with and learn about more faith traditions in the future. It was also incredibly powerful to hear the youth perspectives through our Emerging Interfaith Leaders Dialogues. These were run upon the completion of each of our tours. Learning about other faith traditions from our own is crucial to grow empathy and become better educated citizens within our communities.

As part of my internship, I got to learn more about how non-for-profit organizations function. Seeing the behind the scenes of the grant proposals and administrative tasks was incredibly useful to learn, and this also gave me an even greater appreciation for non-profits and the challenging work they do to help our communities. Overall, I highly enjoyed my experience working with the CIC. I know that I will take the things I learned through this experience with me for the rest of my life.