Exploring Faiths Initiative

Faith has become a powerful force that shapes and informs peoples’ value system, ethics, character, leadership, and their attitude toward work today. New Era Educational and Charitable Support Foundation’s "Exploring Faiths Program" seeks to generate both the intellectual frameworks and practical resources for the issues and opportunities surrounding the understanding and practice of faith. Through this Program, we host religious leaders, scholars and Youth together, to foster intercultural dialogue and interfaith and to stimulate creative thinking, knowledge sharing and to provide a common platform for education and inclusion. Together, they investigate the different ways in which the resources of the world’s faiths, religious traditions and spiritual identities shape and inform social engagement and interaction. The Program helps spiritually-based individuals and communities to heal wounds, end wars, and think “whole.” This engaged, communicative next-generation of participatory citizenry is practicing faith-inspired, people-and-planet decision-making that results in social, economic, cultural, and spiritual prosperity for all, excluding no one.

Since 2009, our Annual International Conference on Youth and Interfaith Dialogue gathers women and men, young adults, including representatives of CSOs and faith-based groups in Nigeria and worldwide. They heal face-to-face with tools of mutual discovery and dignity, while rejecting violence and insisting on human engagement to build their common future. They are applying new tools of communication and forgiveness to take back home to their schools, communities, and nations. For Six years, the annual International Conference on Youth and Interfaith Dialogue has inspired the annual National Youth Media Summit, and disseminated worldwide nearly 6,000 DVDs of its instructive, award-winning film, DIALOGUE IN NIGERIA: Muslims & Christians Creating Their Future. Others already replicate its practices in Nigeria, DR Congo, Ivory Coast, and beyond Africa. Challenging, practical workshops provide the “how-to” for citizens to experience love and create sustainable community, beginning with youth and faith that works in real life.