Interfaith Dialogue

Our Interfaith Dialogue Program helps spiritually-based individuals and communities to heal wounds, end wars, and think “whole.” This engaged, communicative next-generation of participatory youth is practicing faith-inspired, people-and-planet decision-making that results in social, economic, cultural, and spiritual prosperity for all, excluding no one.
Since 2009, our annual Conference gathers women and men young adults, including representatives of CSOs and faith-based groups in Nigeria and worldwide.
They heal face-to-face with tools of mutual discovery and dignity, while rejecting violence and insisting on human engagement to build their common future.
They are applying new tools of communication and forgiveness to take back home to their schools, communities, and nations. For four years, the annual International Conference on Youth and Interfaith Dialogue has inspired the annual National Youth Media Summit, and disseminated worldwide 4,000 DVDs of its instructive, award-winning film, DIALOGUE IN NIGERIA: Muslims & Christians Creating Their Future. Others already replicate its practices in Nigeria, DR Congo, Ivory Coast, and beyond Africa. Challenging, practical workshops provide the “how-to” for citizens to experience love and create sustainable community, beginning with youth and faith that works in real life. Details available at: http://www.needcsi.org/2012/11/4th-international-interfaith-conference-report/ and http://traubman.igc.org/nigeria2010.htm

Our strongest global impact is from our 2012 how-to film, “DIALOGUE IN NIGERIA: Muslims and Christians Creating Their Future” — http://traubman.igc.org/vidnigeria.htm our International co-production with the Jewish-Palestinian Living Room Dialogue Group, California, USA. In the first 2012 year over 3,000 DVDs were requested from every continent by citizens in 570 cities of 70 nations, 20 in Africa.
This documentary gives voices and faces to 200 courageous Muslims and Christians – diverse young women and men – who we united successfully here in Jos, central Nigeria. Refusing to be enemies, they were together during days and evenings of our 2010 International Conference on Youth and Interfaith Communication. They were tense yet excited to finally cross lines of religion, economics, tribe, and gender to transcend the status quo and discover empathy for each other’s personal life experiences.
Together they realized that “an enemy is one whose story we have not heard,” while listening-to-learn and thus dignifying themselves and the “others.” Face to face and in small circles, they began with ice-breakers and continued in depth to discover one another’s equal humanity – fear, grief, needs, hopes, and concrete plans for a shared future. These determined young Nigerians illustrated how others worldwide can successfully connect and communicate to create authentic community.