At the Core of Change

This Goes Way Beyond Campus

IFYC was founded on the idea that today’s emerging leaders will be the ones who ultimately make interfaith cooperation the norm by advancing it in their personal, professional, and civic lives. Our Alumni - the people who took part in this movement in college - are the “Core” in Interfaith Youth Core: a nucleus of people with diverse backgrounds and experiences who did the hard work of bridging divides on campus and left with the vision, knowledge, and skills for interfaith leadership that this hyperdiverse century demands.

Whether you’re a new grad or years into your career, IFYC is committed to helping you succeed long-term. Explore the IFYC Alumni Network to learn about exciting opportunities for professional development, leadership growth, and how to connect with a growing network of peers across the country.

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The Network

We set a big goal for ourselves at IFYC: to make religious pluralism a social norm within the course of a generation. We believe our alumni are the interfaith leaders who will make it happen. Recognizing that we had a decade’s worth of talented interfaith leaders with the potential to achieve our lofty mission, in 2010 we began a formal Alumni Network program with the goal of ensuring that graduates continue to receive the resources they need to advance interfaith cooperation throughout their lives. Today, over 70% of alumni in our network are applying their interfaith leadership skills in their personal and/or professional lives—and our dedicated alumni relations team is working to support and network this community with valuable resources and mentorship as they continue to utilize their interfaith leadership skills.

Members of the Alumni Network are diverse and multifaceted, made up of individuals who represent a wide cross-section of different religious and non-religious worldviews and are making a big mark across various professional fields, social sectors, and issues. In settings like higher education, healthcare, media, business, non-profits, and government, they are pioneering new and innovative ways to make religious pluralism a part of the agenda. This is how interfaith cooperation becomes a norm, and these are the people who are doing the work to make it happen.

In addition to being plugged into a vibrant national network, IFYC Alumni receive access to a wide range of resources and opportunities designed to support them at every stage of their life and career. IFYC is committed to keeping alumni connected to the interfaith movement at every stage of their journey by providing unique benefits like:

Job search and career support
Fellowships, scholarships, and grants
Professional development funds and paid speaking gigs
Regular gatherings and meetups around the country
Continuing education and interfaith leadership training
Community resources and practical guides for interfaith work
Real, friendly, in-person connection to IFYC’s dedicated Alumni Relations Team

Anyone who has participated in IFYC programs and projects as an undergraduate is eligible to join the IFYC Alumni Network after graduation. Learn more about what fellow alumni are doing to advance interfaith cooperation and how to join them.

Explore the Alumni Network

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Alumni Benefits and Resources

Get exclusive access to resources for IFYC Alumni, including funding for professional development and ongoing support for your interfaith leadership.

Meet Some of Our IFYC Alumni

Karin Firoza

- Karin Firoza / Boston, MA, Muslim read more read less

Karin Firoza / Boston, MA, Muslim

Interfaith cooperation has been a theme through Karin's whole career. She got her feet wet with interfaith organizing work as an undergrad at Wellesley College, which led her to her first job as a labor organizer with a public sector union in Maryland. From there she channeled her love for leadership development and joined Interfaith Action, a Boston-based youth organization committed to bringing high schoolers together across faith lines to work together on skill building, interfaith leadership, and social action. She used that experience to co-found Roots and Wings Training and Consultation, a practice dedicated to working with schools, community groups, and houses of worship to provide training to support diversity and inclusion efforts. Now, her career path has brought her to supporting interfaith work on a college campus as the Senior Assistant Director at the Center for Spirituality, Dialogue, and Service at Northeastern University. When it comes to channeling interfaith leadership skills into a career, Karin's got it down.

Tahil Sharma

- Tahil Sharma / Claremont, CA, Hindu and Sikh read more read less

Tahil Sharma / Claremont, CA, Hindu and Sikh

With interfaith cooperation on the brain, Tahil Sharma is pretty much never bored. He is dedicated to the positive impact of religion and humanism on the world and current events, and that has led him to work on lots of initiatives at the intersection of interfaith cooperation, social justice, and youth empowerment. Tahil says that as a person who identifies as both Hindu and Sikh, he is literally living out the values of an interfaith world on a daily basis, and studying Spanish and International Studies as an undergraduate at the University of LaVerne only solidified his passion, so now he is working to promote diversity and pluralism as key foundations for a stable society in every way he can. He splits his time between several projects, working with AMP Global Youth, the University of Southern California’s Office of Religious Life, and Sadhana: the Coalition for Progressive Hindus. No matter where or with whom, one thing is always true – Tahil prides himself on finding a way to bring interfaith cooperation to any project.

Kiki Sykes

- Kiki Sykes / Minneapolis, MN, Protestant Christian read more read less

Kiki Sykes / Minneapolis, MN, Protestant Christian

One of the life experiences that inspired Kiki Sykes most was traveling to Israel and Palestine. After seeing all of the physical and mental walls being built, she returned passionate about interfaith community organizing as a way to build bridges of peace and to promote healing. Back on campus at St. Olaf College, she established a campus interfaith group which hosted weekly dinner dialogues and planned events to promote interfaith literacy and understanding. After graduating, Kiki knew that she wasn’t done with interfaith work, and went on to participate in a year of service while living in an intentional multi-faith community with other young women working at nonprofits in the same area. Kiki says that she feels the Divine through service and relationships, and one of the ways she has lived into that has been by organizing events with other IFYC Alumni in her area, working to establish strong ties that will help to create spaces where all may be seen and heard, and all may trust that their and their neighbors’ lives matter.