By Drew Lindsay, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, October 5, 2021
After Haiti’s August earthquake, as relief organizations rushed in, Eboo Patel pointed to a lesson for equity advocates in the United States. Many groups putting boots on the ground in the Caribbean country were anchored in a religious faith, with aid workers who were Catholic and Jewish, Islamic and evangelical Christianity, Lutheran and Episcopalian. Patel’s rhetorical question: If people who embrace different ideas of creation and salvation find common ground in a mission of mercy, couldn’t those who fight for justice do the same?
You might expect such an argument from Patel, who founded the Interfaith Youth Core some 20 years ago to make interfaith coalitions the norm, particularly in efforts for social good. But the message takes on even more importance today, he says, because religion is largely absent from equity campaigns. The movements of Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela all drew strength from interfaith coalitions built on a shared belief in love, equity, and the dignity of every human being. “We need to bring that to the fore, we need to learn from that, and we need to do the 21st-century expression of it,” he says.
Patel has not always espoused what he calls “love-based activism.” In the 1990s, while a student at the University of Illinois, he was a racial-justice warrior fueled by anger. “I just would breathe fire wherever I went,” he says. His intensity was such that his roommate took to sleeping on a friend’s couch to escape his rage and his rants.
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