Increasing Interfaith Involvement

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This project took place as part of an extracurricular organization at Dartmouth known as Design Corps. Design Corps provides students with the opportunity to work as design consultants with local, on-campus organizations to solve systemic issues. Students apply to join the program and are placed on teams to work directly with clients over the course of 20 weeks to need-find, prototype, and iterate successful solutions. My team and I were paired with Dartmouth’s Tucker Center as our project partner. The Tucker Center is responsible for facilitating interfaith on campus. This means that as a governing body, the center oversees all student-led faith groups on campus, while also providing a non-denominational space for spiritual events, programming support, and funding. We worked directly with the Tucker Center’s director, Reverend Nancy Vogele. The problem identified by our client was trouble with engagement from different student-led faith groups both between each other and with the Tucker Center as a whole. To understand the barriers to increased involvement, we explored the organizational structure of the relationship between the Tucker Center and each of the groups, identifying group leaders, policy facilitators, language and literature used in these relationships, and most impactful student input on personal barriers.

To further our research, we explored analogous groups on campus including the Dartmouth Outing Club and Dartmouth’s Mock-Trial Club. From these examples, we learned that students rarely attend non mandatory events, however mandatory meetings feel like an obligation when not valuable to students. Familiarity and routine builds community, and eventually investment in community replaces mandatory obligation as reason for attendance in many students cases. From current practice, campus events that begin as mandatory often form an enjoyable habit, even after the events become optional, fostering a sense of community and shared accountability. With this in mind, our product needed to create a culture within the Tucker Center that prompts commitment and engagement. Interfaith can bring together students to talk across difference, thus creating a shared culture of investment.

Our solution creates a welcoming community for all students, fostering awareness of Tucker’s offerings and engagement with interfaith dialogue. It also achieves our client’s goal of decreasing administrative and advisory burden for ministers, shifting leadership to student-elected positions.

This model both relieves administrative burden as well as empowers students to gain practical experience from leading extracurricular groups. Our proposed solution also puts in place a sustained support system that helps to transmit knowledge across years and maintain continuity within ever-changing student groups. As students graduate, institutional knowledge of how to operate different faith groups is often lost, but by sharing experiences and formalizing relationships between faith-group leaders, information is systemically retained.

A critical component of our proposed solution was a development of a curriculum to structure this relationship between different faith-groups. Our proposal is a three-tiered curriculum focused on nurturing both interpersonal relationships and professional development opportunities across the span of a students time at Dartmouth, as laid out in the graphic to the right. This curriculum complements the Tucker Student Council model, aligning council meetings and structuring the focus of content covered during these meetings.

As the graphic suggests, the first stage is for newly involved students, often freshmen or sophomores. This tier focuses on cultivating involvement in one’s own faith group. At this stage, students are encouraged to seek involvement in the management of their group through a leadership position. We also suggest planning events like retreats and sharing spiritual autobiographies to strengthen connections between members within a group.

The second stage is geared at facilitating interfaith exploration. The Tucker Center represents interfaith at Dartmouth, and through the suggested curriculum, students would engage other faith groups in ways not currently done. This would involve attending meetings of other faith groups, meeting with leaders to gain insights on budgets, event planning, and student engagement. We also suggest faith groups engage in joint event planning to host events together.

The third stage is focused on helping students take the skills they have learned from their involvement in their own faith and with interfaith relationships and apply them in a professional sense. This includes hearing from alumni, working more closely with Tucker Center staff, and learning from members of different groups their experiences and goals.

We structured the opportunity to run a prototype of the Tucker Student Council to gain student feedback on our proposed idea. Our prototype gathered as many students from different faith groups as possible to attend a collaborative workshop with each other. The content of this meeting focused on introducing our research on the lack of interfaith relationships between the groups, as well as the benefits of these relationships. We then paired students up with members from different faith groups and had students engage in thoughtful discussions about interfaith prompts. We then took time at the end to get feedback on what went well and what didn’t. Overall we found students really enjoyed the collaborative environment and the willingness to contribute felt by everyone. Some students remarked that the pace was a bit too fast, impacting our recommendations for the final implementation of our proposal.

The handoff to facilitate the implementation of our proposed Council included clear guidelines of Do’s and Don'ts of students programming, all transition documents including a calendar of programming, application emails, and a language resource for different groups. Most importantly, we included suggestions for incorporating feedback into ongoing programming to enable our client to continue to iterate and refine the Council after our involvement.