Steinhardt Senior Sees Interfaith Dialogue as Key to Building Peace

By Timothy Farrell

For Frank Fredericks, a graduating senior in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, the world’s different religious faiths are not an obstacle for peace-building, but a vehicle for positive social action. As a student in the school’s music business program, Fredericks founded World Faith, a nonprofit organization that brings together religiously diverse students for international service projects.

      As a sophomore, Fredericks studied in Florence, Italy, and traveled to Egypt to research the history of Christian and Muslim relations in the region. It was while working as a cook in Cyprus in the summer of 2006, as the war between Hezbollah and Israel raged nearby, that the idea for World Faith crystallized in his mind.

      “Watching the war unfold really allowed me to see how religion is too often used as a divisive tool,” he said. “That was the moment that solidified my calling to start World Faith.”

      Reaching out to campus religious leaders upon his return to NYU that fall, Fredericks, a non-denominational Christian, sought to find other like-minded students interested in interfaith volunteer work. Working with 10 students at first, the group volunteered at soup kitchens and created religious exploration events, such as an interfaith Passover Seder.

      In 2007, World Faith partnered with Interfaith Youth Core, a global nonprofit started by author Eboo Patel. Earlier this year, Fredericks was invited by Patel to participate in a roundtable discussion of youth and faith on ABC’s Good Morning America, and then attended the 2008 Clinton Global Initiative University, held in New Orleans.

      Currently, Fredericks is working with New York City’s Office of Emergency Management and the New York Disaster Interfaith Service, a local nonprofit, to help develop protocols to train houses of worship to mobilize resources in emergency situations, such as natural disasters or terrorist attacks. World Faith has already trained one house of worship as an “Emergency Rest Center,” and is looking to train 40 more by the end of the year.

      “We’re excited about this model especially for those communities where there is potential for religiously incited communal violence,” says Fredericks.

      Following graduation, Fredericks hopes to be able to work full-time on World Faith to begin more aggressive fundraising for the organization.

Frank Fredericks