Someday, we won't need these.
Well, it’s come down to it. I leave next Tuesday for six weeks of training for my new job (my first day is October 1st) and I couldn’t be more excited. A bit of background:
A year ago, an encounter between Eboo Patel, the Executive Director of the Interfaith Youth Core, and Tony Blair, former UK Prime Minister and founder of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation led to the creation of the Faiths Act Fellowship. The Fellowship is a select group of young interfaith leaders from the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. Over 700 applications were fielded for these positions, and the search process lasted from the initial application essays in January to phone interviews in February and individual and group interviews in March. I’m one of the 30.
The Faiths Act Fellows will spend the next ten months working to create an international, interfaith coalition, focusing mainly on youth within religious communities in the US, UK, and Canada. This grand coalition will make the eradication of malaria its great goal. Malaria kills a million or so people a year, mostly children. Like Rotary International and polio, we want this interfaith coalition to “own” malaria eradication. It can be done.
Next week, I fly to London for two weeks of training with the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. Then the Fellows split into three groups and head to Mali and Malawi and Tanzania, where I will spend three weeks meeting with health professionals on the cutting edge of malaria work. Then it’s two more weeks in Chicago training with the Interfaith Youth Core. After that, I visit my family for a few days and head back to Denver to pack my Dodge Neon with my girlfriend and what little else I can carry and zoom out west to San Jose, where my site partner and I will office out of the Islamic Networks Group, a local interfaith hub.
I’m so excited that sleep fails to come easily. This is big. This is brand new. We aren’t just going to be doing the Fellowship – we’re going to be building it.
Each interfaith team (my site partner is a Muslim woman) will have a different strategy. I plan on engaging in some pretty large-scale web-based advocacy. If you’re reading this, there’s a fair chance that you can help us reach even more people. I’m serious – drop me an email or comment on this post and we’ll see what we can figure out.
And as always, thank you.
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