• What are some strategies for faith-based organizations serving communities with varying cultural and religious views, without imposing values?  

We have had a lot of success by prioritizing the agency of the communities we serve. Our exploratory delegations identify potential partnerships, and we do not establish a new project until we are invited by a local community or organization in a potential project location. The work that we do in that area will also be flexible depending on the needs and requests expressed by the community. If a point comes when our partners feel that our presence no longer serves them, we leave.

All of this is astrue of a secular human rights organization as it is of a faith-based organization, but I believe it is one of the keys to the trust we are able to establish in a variety of different cultural and religious contexts. Although we are empowered by our own faith and spiritual leadings to do the work, putting the partners at the center of what we do helps to ensure that we are not imposing our own values on a context that is not our own. 

Talking about "busy-ness" and a ten hour time difference, I am jumping into this important conversation, in between writing a book on diversity and some of the most ancient religions of the world in South Asia.

On strategies for stengthening interfaith partnerships and working with other rights organizations including secular ones, I have learnt that there is a lot of good work going on such as this conversation here and am very grateful to the organizers. But I find that these excellent peace building conversations do not always trickle down. We need to encourage this level and quality of conversation, in different degrees, by sowing seeds of peacebuilding and strategies at schools, universities and especially in the media. In Cambridge, UK, for instance I was involved, along with Dr Kessler, in introducing some of the first courses of its kind in the 800 year history of the University on Muslim-Jewish-Christian relations. We introduced these courses at the university, but we also enagaged with schools. We had courses for the media and other courses for the police. Some of our students at the university were rabbis, imams and priests and I saw the hostility break down between them as these wonderful scholars learnt to become friends and to trust each other after learning about our shared histories. After the courses, a number of different faith leaders paired up and carried out some very good community projects in London and in other places.

This work also resulted in a book called Valuing Diversity: Towards Mutual Respect and Understanding which was distributed to hundreds of schools across the UK.    

At Forman Christian College (FC) in Pakistan, I introduced interdisciplinary courses using the local language (as some English words, in a post colonial context, such as "interfaith" do not translate well locally). A small number of young restless boys- a minority, not the majority - in my class from war torn cities were agitated and angry and more worryingly even said that members of other faith communities should not be tolerated. But after we taught them the basic foundations of dialogue, including empathy, the dialogue of civilizations, the constitution which focused on equality and human rights, and the message of compassion in the Abrahamic faiths, including the idea of the Dignity of Difference, and women and gender, these young boys said they were "changed" men and promised to change their world by the pen, and not by violence.