Well it’s about time!

This blog was creating to track the implementation of the White House Initiative throughout this year, yet because of the busy event plannings and activities, I’m afraid that this blog was neglected! Nonetheless, I shall start from the beginning and work my way to the present to help document what exactly has been going on this year at Puget Sound.

The White House Initiative is our fancy little term to shorten the very wordy “The President’s Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge.” What this Challenge or Initiative seeks to accomplish is eliminate hostility between religious groups on college campuses, instead implementing techniques and creating events to bring people together in conversation, community, and service. And, really, what better way to do so than establishing a commitment to community service! By rallying these groups together and working on service projects together, we can start conversations that focus on the values that we have in common. This way of thinking can help us see the similarities, rather than just the differences, in each other and learn to respect the inspirations of other people that help them create a better world.

Last summer, Puget Sound faculty (especially our chaplain Dave Wright!) put together a proposal for the Campus Challenge and sent it off to the White House. This proposal included plans about who we would work with, how we would establish connections, and what our expectations and conclusions hope to look like by creating an initiative for greater interfaith cooperation and community service on our campus. Much of our proposal spoke of things that we have already implemented and hoped to expand–like Alternative Fall/Spring Breaks and Interfaith Council–as well as some new projects like creating better advertisements, creating and hosting retreats, and hiring staff to help better connect clubs and other organizations to our Community Initiative and Action Center–the hub of community service and social justice opportunities on campus and beyond! We hoped to increase community service overall in the general campus culture as well as in established religious groups.

Our proposal was approved by the White House and even got special mention at the big Campus Challenge conference that Dave Wright attended last summer!

My job this year is to help oversee, support, and encourage this movement on our campus. I do things like attend Interfaith Council meetings (now called Taste of Religion, meets on Thursdays at 5pm in the basement of Kilworth if you’re interested!), JuST meetings (Justice and Service in Tacoma, meets Mondays at 5pm in Wheelock 201), and Alternative Breaks to monitor how many people participate, why, and how they found out about our little shindigs. I also track the implementation of service opportunities in a variety of religious and spiritual groups on campus. Some of my personal projects have been establishing a regular weekly meditation time and organizing an EcoSpirituality Retreat.

I’ll update this blog in a short while to chronologize and analyze the various wonderful and inspiring events and clubs that have been going on this year!

You can view the government’s page for the Campus Challenge here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ofbnp/interfaithservice