'A Broader Sense of We': Interfaith Community Organizing and Civic Education

Recently, scholars have noted that multicultural societies have the challenge of constructing nation-states that reflect and incorporate the diversity of their citizens while promoting an overarching set of shared values, ideals, and goals to which all of their citizens are committed (Gutmann, 2004).;In such a context, this study views an interfaith community organizing group, The Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO), as a place for adult multicultural, interfaith civic education. It builds on the research conducted on community organizing and civic education and explores the individual and structural factors that impact people of faith to engage in interfaith community organizing and solve shared problems. Building on the qualifying paper I wrote about the external and internal factors that contributed to Protestant and Catholic congregational leaders' engagement in community organizing with One LA -- IAF (Chung, 2010), I write about the individual and organizational factors that influence people of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian faiths to be involved in the civic engagement efforts of GBIO, an affiliate of One LA -- IAF and a member of the national community organizing network, the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF).;I conducted a qualitative study by interviewing 30 Jewish, Muslim, and Christian institutional and lay leaders of GBIO. While interviews served as the main method of data collection, informal observations of meetings, trainings, and other GBIO events provided contextual information and memos written of these observations gave further material for understanding the answers to the research questions. Findings help to inform practices for interfaith and civic education and action, particularly of adults, and shed further light on how individuals conceptualize their engagement with community organizing.