Deadline: 13-Sep-21
The Muslim Jewish Solidarity Committee’s (MJSC) Emerging Leaders Fellowship (ELF), launched in the summer of 2020, is a summer-long leadership development intensive for emerging leaders of diverse faith backgrounds ages 18-25.
Over the course of eight weeks, young leaders come together to learn and build skills across a wide range of disciplines, foster community across faith lines, and apply their learning to a social impact project in their local communities. They engage in a series of workshops aimed at cultivating empathy; narrative identity development; combating bias within and across communities; understanding their individual and collective power; and designing for social change.
The Muslim Jewish Solidarity Committee (MJSC) is a grassroots organization rooted in the shared religious values of learning, peace, and charity. They cultivate emerging leaders by helping them build deep, authentic, and nuanced relationships across divides, equipping them to tackle intractable challenges – all in service of building shared vision for societies that center social justice and care for their fellow human. Solidarity is not a goal in and of itself, but rather a tool for transforming fear, violence and disunity into trust, collective healing, and liberation for all.
Goals
- deep learning and ability to perspective-take within the framework of “in-group/out-group” as foundation for combating anti-semitism, Islamophobia, Christian hegemony, and many other forms of faith- and tradition-based bias;
- relationship building between cohort participants, who come from racially, ethnically, socioeconomically, and religiously diverse backgrounds;
- introduction to a wide variety of skills required to make social change across industries;
- project design, applying skills learned throughout the fellowship to initiatives aimed at structural social change within participants’ local communities.
Their pilot elf in summer 2020 had significant success in achieving the goals they set for the program, including:
- Strong relationships built between cohort participants, and ongoing post-program cohort engagement
- Cohort participants volunteer together regularly in their own/each other’s local communities
- Cohort participants have joined MJSC’s Young Leaders Board, a lay leadership body formed in January 2020 and that continues to expand year over year
Eligibility Criteria
- This fellowship is engaging and interactive, the workshops will require your full participation. These are not lecture style meetings where you can turn the video off. They expect you to have your cameras on at all times, unless there are special circumstances, and fully engage in connecting and building relationships with your cohort.
- The 2021 cohort is open for anyone within the United States.
For more information, visit https://muslimjewishsolidarity.org/fellowship/