Seventeen young adults, mostly in their twenties, gathered in San Francisco on February 2 for an urban field trip with a unique mission: to explore what a thriving interfaith young adult community would look like in the city. Through United Religions Initiative (URI), I was organizing the trip as a part of our Bay Area Young Leaders Program.
United Religions Initiative
The idea to create a global forum for preventing and responding to interreligious conflict came to URI President and Founder Rt. Rev. William E. Swing, then-Episcopal Bishop of California, asked to host a UN 50th anniversary celebration at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco in 1995. He found little interest among top religious leaders, but at the grassroots level he found a deep desire for peace and social justice. From this, the idea for a bottom-up global interfaith network was born.