New CC: Center for Religious Tolerance
February 4th, 2008
URI North America recently welcomed in a new Cooperation Circle from Sarasota, Florida: The Center for Religious Tolerance. With roots in the quest for peace in the Middle East, the group has built up a strong membership around global-local connections and dialogue. Welcome to the Center fore Religious Tolerance! Read on for more information about our most recent member.
Andrea (Andy) Blanch got involved with interfaith peace work in the Middle East when she met Elana Rozenman, a URI supporter and Israeli interfaith organizer, and others in the Middle East in 2000. She has been back to the region numerous times to support the local work and to return to the U.S. to educate Americans about the peace movement there. It became clear that a local non-profit was needed in order to provide a strong foundation for this support and education work.
Once a board and other members were brought together, the new group — the Center for Religious Tolerance, based in Sarasota, Florida, USA — moved toward dual aims: continuing to support the Middle East peace work, and working locally in Sarasota and elsewhere. Their purpose statement reads “We promote peace and harmony through dialogue among the world’s religions and through spiritually based interfaith activities.”
Their aspirations in the world are summed up further in this vision: “We convene and support people of different faiths to overcome the barriers between them, learn about each other’s religions, pray and do spiritual practices together, and demonstrate to the world that people of different religious beliefs can live and work together in peace.”
Some highlights of the group’s work so far:
- Helping facilitate the formation of Abrahamic Reunion,which is also a URI Cooperation Circle. It is one of the few organizations in the Middle East that includes both men and women and has all four major religions involved.
- Getting women’s interfaith leadership work going in the Middle East
- The local work in Sarasota that is beginning to pay off. A multi-faith holiday celebration in December drew over 40 Muslim, Jewish, Christian and African-American women to share their religious traditions.
Future plans for the Center for Religious Tolerance include
- Organizing interfaith activities for a world women’s conference in Sophia, Bulgaria in 2010.
- Continued support for Middle East work, especially with women.
- Connect more with other opportunities in the U.S., for instance, attending the National Congressional Prayer Breakfast and Leadership week in February, and speaking to a group of 50 political leaders about the importance of women’s interfaith work in building a sustainable peace in the Middle East.