Thank you for visiting! In my DU position as Interfaith Chair, I have been working for a number of years (including with many colleagues, faculty, staff, and students) to create, curate, and assemble practical, concrete materials for helping bring more religious inclusivity into our workplaces.

I am especially thankful to Andrea Stanton, Greg Robbins, Derigan Silver, Deb Ortega, and Christina Paguyo for many ongoing collaborations and conversations that have allowed my own thinking about religious inclusivity to grow, and whose friendship and partnership along the way undoubtedly find their way into whatever is best about these materials. 

The "Interfaith Your Calendar" project started at my kitchen table in 2015 when I spent a number of weekends creating (editing, deleting, re-creating, etc.!) an early set of multi-media materials (PDFs, videos, etc.) that turned into the seed for DU's Interfaith Your Calendar project through DU's Center for Judaic Studies in partnership with many units across campus.

You can click below see some of the early phases of that project (including links to the Center's Flickr account where you can find photos of campus-wide interfaith "superheroes" (!) who "interfaithed" their calendars with our simple 12-minute set of guides, also available on this page):

https://www.du.edu/ahss/cjs/interfaith.html

In 2018, this project became one piece of a larger Religious Inclusivity Initiative at DU, including DU's participation (based on a grant co-authored by Andrea Stanton (Religious Studies) and myself) as one of ten campuses in a new grant initiative from Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC) and Association for American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). The project also became part of a Winter 2019 grant awarded to Greg Robbins (Religious Studies) and myself from our campus' Madden Center for innovative campus projects around interreligious dialogue and literacy which itself led to a Summer 2019 grant (co-authored by Andrea Stanton, Greg Robbins, and myself) from the Mellon Foundation for further work in these areas.

The project also grew in Spring of 2019, when, working with Christina Paguyo (Office of Teaching and Learning, DU) and Susanne Sherba (Computer Science, DU), a group of DU undergraduate students began developing the new InterfaithIt app which we anticipate releasing in 2020 on the Apple Store; the app is unique in two ways:

1. It "interfaiths" your regular online calendar, replacing the 12-minute process above (and if you'd like, you can then delete the app from your phone)
2. If you additionally choose to keep the app on your phone (we hope you do!), the app not only has great search functionality and quick links to Wikipedia entries about upcoming religious holidays, it also incorporates a growing body of "Holiday Fact Sheets" that give you a briefing on practical things like how to pronounce a holiday name, what is/not an appropriate greeting on that holiday, what are a few useful summary points about the holiday, what are some regional foods associated with that holiday, etc.

The "Holiday Fact Sheet" project is now a three-campus partnership between DU, University of Miami, and Concordia College; all three of our campuses are part of the "pilot class" (2018--  ) of the IFYC and AAC&U partnership mentioned above.

You can read more about the 3-campus partnership around the Holiday Fact Sheets, the InterfaithIt App, and broader Religious Inclusivity initiatives in a feature story in the November 2019 AAC&U Newsletter.

The Mellon Foundation grant mentioned above also generously funds a 2-day Religious Inclusivity Workshop (October 2019) for campus administrators, featuring guest speaker Noah Silverman from IFYC. The resources on this page are "Action Plan" materials for that workshop. These were created by my drawing on a number of principles and templates from the Stanford D-School (including some of their published design thinking books, and an October 2019 D-School webinar I participated in through a campus initiative supported by Marty Katz's office), a design thinking session at DU in July 2019 (led by Kate Willink and Darrin Hicks), an IFYC workshop I attended with Eboo Patel and Laurie Patton (in June 2019), and a Curriculum Design Institute I attended (August 2018, led by Viginia Pitts and Bridget Arend). The Assessment Sheets on this page were co-created by Christina Paguyo and Padraic Fitzgerald.

Questions? Ideas? Comments? Please email me at sarah.pessin@du.edu

If your office schedules an event on a religious holiday that you have reason to think will exclude some campus members from attending: Acknowledge & Apologize.

What if in spite of all best efforts your office finds itself scheduling a meeting or event on a religious holiday? There is no ideal way to address situations like this, but acknowledgment + apology is better than hoping no one notices. In such cases, consider including the following sort of language on your website and on your event materials:

“We apologize to those who might be unable to attend our event due to [name of holiday]; scheduling and other factors led us to select this date, and we hope to avoid similar outcomes in the future. Inclusivity - including religious inclusivity - is a value we work hard to uphold.”

Adding language along these lines to your marketing and website in cases of holiday conflicts helps show that your office is (1) in the habit of consulting an interfaith calendar, (2) aware that the event date likely excludes people from attending, and (3) apologetic for the outcome (and committed to trying in earnest to do better in the future).

https://www.du.edu/ahss/cjs/interfaith.html

Find step-by-step instructions for Office 365, Office 2016, and Google Calendars. It takes about 12 minutes!

(Coming soon: InterfaithIt app for Apple phones will do these steps for you in one simple click!)

Any_Year_monthly-calendar_combined-weekend.xlsx

• If the above timeline doesn't give you enough room to write, click the above link for a file (from Vertex42.com) you can use as a starting "scratch pad" for timelining your goals; I like this one for setting works goals because it starts each week on a Monday and it combines Sat/Sun to take up less space
• Print out 12-18 months for scribbling and revising your timeline goals, or just type directly into the template on your computer; whatever works best for you! (I personally like to print out the months and tape them in a long strip on the wall- it's fun to write on the wall!)
• Type in ANY YEAR in the year field, and decide if you'd like your calendar weeks to start on Sunday or Monday 
• Prefer another template? Visit Vertex42.com, CalendarLabs.com, etc. for other templates!
• Don't forget: For your plan to be real, when you're done with this "scratch pad" don't forget to enter your final timeline goals into your real everyday online work calendar!

This sheet is based on materials from DU's Office of Teaching and Learning's Curriculum Design Institute (Summer 2018) led by Virginia Pitts and Bridget Arend.

Resource on other campuses: https://www.ifyc.org/resources/religious-accommodations-and-policies#student%20group

Eboo’s blog: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/conversations-diversity

Piece on student leadership and discrimination: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/conversations-diversity/should-colleges-de-register-student-groups

Report on data from first year of IDEALS: https://www.ifyc.org/sites/default/files/resources/IDEALSFirstYear.pdf

Leadership practices article: https://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/2015/winter-spring/patel

IFYC resource library: https://www.ifyc.org/resources

Noah Silverman

Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships

Interfaith Youth Core

141 W Jackson Blvd, Suite 3200, Chicago, IL 60604

Direct: 312.376.4789 | noah@ifyc.org

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