I’ve been to a lot of potlucks in my life, but my favorite potluck was one that didn’t serve any food: the potluck of interfaith dialogue. While a potluck with no food may sound oxymoronic, I call it this because it represents how we gathered as a group, each person bringing their own experiences and perspectives, which resonated with me. Through my time in the BILI fellowship and in doing group work with BILI, I truly grew to understand how potlucks–literally and metaphorically–are important to interfaith life and organizing.

My first year at Williams College, there wasn’t any widespread interfaith life. I had to create the position of Interfaith Coordinator on the board of the Jewish Association, as I wanted to recreate the supportive community I’d found doing interfaith work in high school. As the only Interfaith Coordinator on campus, I organized most events on my own, with people who had less of an interest in interfaith than me. While I didn’t begrudge them this–after all, to each their own–I did start to feel both burnt out and lonely in my community organizing. It grew hard to wake up every day and push for interfaith initiatives when it felt like nobody else cared, and it was hard to plan events that most religious group presidents had no interest in attending. Even so, my deep belief in interfaith and in the community connections formed pushed me to keep going. 

This year, when I launched Williams Interfaith Dialogue, a residential dorm community built around interfaith engagement, I didn’t expect anything to be different. Of course, unlike other on-campus interfaith opportunities where participants came and went, this would be the unique chance to live and grow within a tight-knit community that regularly engaged in dialogue. But, given that this was still taking place on a campus that had shown only mild interest in interfaith, I figured I would still be on my own for organizing and convincing the community that interfaith mattered. 

My first week of being a leader for the dorm, I felt overwhelmed. In addition to setting up comfortable common areas, putting up door decorations, and finding a time to gather as a big group, I realized that planning an interfaith event each week to keep the community engaged would be a lot of work.

Then I joined the Building Interfaith Leadership Initiative (BILI) Launchpad fellowship, invited by my college chaplain to participate in the fellowship. In one of the sessions with BILI, I talked with several other student organizers about this. How did they navigate feeling overwhelmed and burnt out as the sole organizer on campus? We agreed that self-care was important in interfaith organizing work, but I still felt lost in finding balance. 

That changed, when one BILI friend brought up a concept from the first week of our program: the interfaith potluck. The name, in some ways, is a misnomer: there wasn’t any actual food involved. But the interfaith potluck is the idea that for interfaith dialogues, each person comes with their own experiences, presenting and sharing while sampling other perspectives. Then, just as one leaves the potluck with whatever Tupperware they served in, participants collect themselves, reflect on the dialogue, and return, maybe changed, maybe not, to their daily lives. 

To me, the idea of a potluck resonated with residential structure. I realized that a large part of my stress came from trying to involve the diverse range of interests that residents had. I realized that instead of overworking myself to tailor to everyone’s range of interests, it would help us come together as a community to have residents as leaders and taking an active role in programming. I decided it would be required for residents, using our funding, to organize at least one event for the house. This way, each resident would bring their experiences, perspectives, passions, and strengths to the house, allowing us to sample different ways of engaging in an interfaith manner. 

Almost immediately, this was a success. Not only did I feel less stressed as the organizer, but was thrilled by the enthusiasm of my residents who organized events from a Taoist Tea Ceremony, to cooking for Shabbat Dinner, to Diwali Celebrations, in addition to some who chose to stick with more traditional dinner events (Chipotle and Chat, anyone?). I got a co-leader, someone I didn’t know before, who was two years below me in college, who also started helping me keep momentum for events. 

I realized that if I had done interfaith alone, as I was used to doing on a campus I had widely perceived as uninterested in interfaith, we all would have missed out on these enriching and engaging events that were informed by different life experiences. While I had been preparing a metaphorical three-course meal by myself, turning that experience into a potluck made it more enriching both for me and for others. BILI made me realize that there’s no shame in asking for help when it comes to interfaith organizing, because ultimately community engagement–in the form of many dishes and perspectives at the potluck–leads to a more fulfilling experience for all.

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Image: interfaith dialogue and community-building can be imagined as a potluck, among other metaphors which call to mind a collaborative and open perspective on connecting across difference. Credit: royalty free, non-commercial usage from PickPic.