Emerging Leaders Fellowship
The Muslim Jewish Solidarity Committee’s (MJSC) Emerging Leaders Fellowship (ELF), launched in the summer of 2020, is is a leadership development program for emerging leaders of diverse faith backgrounds. The 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 our individual and collective power; and designing for social change.
The Emerging Leadership Fellowship has four primary 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.
Our pilot ELF in Summer 2020 had significant success in achieving the goals we 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
Videos created by the 2020 cohort to promote interfaith engagement and the work of the Muslim-Jewish Solidarity Committee: