For many of my early Boston Interfaith Leadership Initiative (BILI) sessions, as well as my time at the Interfaith Leadership Institute in Chicago, I felt like I was doing a lot of personal development. I was learning good, tangible skills, and I was building relationships with other emerging interfaith leaders. While I never doubted that the skills I was learning would translate into some kind of action on my campus, I was having a difficult time figuring out what that might look like. It all felt very big. I didn’t know how I would even start or where to focus. I continued to attend BILI meetings and serve on Tufts’ Interfaith Student Council, waiting for my lightbulb moment when it would all come together.

This moment finally came shortly into the spring semester. It started in February at the BILI retreat, two days where students from different campuses came together for self-reflection and interfaith exploration. A lot of things we had talked about and worked on throughout the year were coming together, and everything was feeling a bit more tangible. 

Many people came to the retreat without much prior experience with interfaith engagement. The retreat in general reminded me a lot of CAFE, a six-week pre-orientation program for incoming first-years at Tufts centered around interfaith work and identity exploration. Many of the participants in CAFE also come in with little experience with the concept of interfaith. 

CAFE and the BILI retreat had a lot of conceptual similarities, but in execution they felt quite different. What stuck out to me was that at the retreat, everyone (apart from the BILI fellows) was in the same boat—everyone was a little unfamiliar and figuring it out together. I liked this, and I thought it felt very organic. In CAFE, there are peer leaders, who have been trained, and they go through the program with the first-years, modeling things like vulnerability and openness. This approach works well too, specifically with the first-years, since they’ve just moved away from home and are often feeling very nervous. It’s also organic, but in a different way.

Many of the peer leaders had participated in the CAFE program before, so they had already been through the workshops, done the site visits, and reflected on those experiences. They knew what to expect, and in a lot of cases it felt like they already knew what to say. In the context of CAFE specifically, this works. Their very purpose is to serve as models for the incoming class. 

But this is a trend that I’ve noticed in a lot of interfaith spaces at Tufts all year long.

Most of the people who come to interfaith events during the academic year are the same ones who always come, and many took part in CAFE as well. After attending the BILI retreat and reflecting on how my experience was different than the ones I’d had in interfaith spaces at Tufts, I came to a realization: Tufts’ interfaith community is a small, close-knit, specific group of people. They come to events, and it’s like they immediately know how to turn on a certain vibe. It’s vulnerable, and compassionate, and feels like it’s all good things. This group already knows what’s going to happen and what it’s going to be like. We’re going to share and grow together, hopefully. 

There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of this, and I am grateful that such a warm community has been able to grow on Tufts’ campus. But I am starting to wonder if we are in some kind of rut, preventing ourselves from growing further. This phenomenon, for lack of a better word, can be a little isolating and scary for new people who are trying to join in for the first time. 

The example I’ve been using to explain this is an activity called community guidelines. Basically, before doing anything else, we come together as a group and set guidelines for the space, intentions that cultivate a respectful atmosphere. It’s meant to be like a social contract. The act of establishing community guidelines has become a staple in the interfaith world at Tufts. I did it for the first time as a first-year in CAFE, and it feels like I’ve done it a million times since then. It’s an important activity, but because we have all done it so many times, everyone already knows which buzzwords to throw out: “take space, make space,” and “listen to understand, not to respond,” among others. 

I know when I did my first community guidelines, I was so confused and completely lost, but I had my peer leaders to guide me through it. But in a regular event during the school year, there are no peer leaders, and everyone should have the opportunity for learning and growth. If I was a random student going to my first interfaith event and they said, “community guidelines,” I would be confused. As everyone else puts their hands up and immediately starts using phrases I’ve never heard, all just seeming to know what was going on, I probably wouldn’t want to come back.

All of these thoughts are still pretty new, and I’m still working through them. What I do know is that I want to make interfaith work more accessible to everyone, specifically at Tufts. I want anyone to be able to come to any event, without feeling like they missed out on some kind of “interfaith 101.” I’m not completely sure what this looks like, but the Interfaith Student Council has begun to have these conversations and explore tangible ideas for how to grow our community and make it more open. It’s not good enough to wait around and only funnel in new people from CAFE every August. We should be actively working to keep things inviting, engaging, and accessible to all Tufts students, whether it’s their first interfaith event or they’ve been coming for four years.