Interfaith Summer Internship Program (ISIP)
A collaboration of Office of Religious Life and Pace Center for Civic Engagement.
The Interfaith Summer Internship Program (ISIP) is a new initiative with the mission to train Princeton University undergraduate students in interfaith organizing through hands-on summer internships in New York City. Students will have individual internships with different host organizations and will work and learn collectively through a week-long intensive seminar focused on religion and civic life, academic inquiry into the social role of religion, and regular peer group meetings. Each student will be placed with different secular organization, each with a particular issue of social concern (including domestic violence, incarceration, immigration, and public education). The student interns will develop interfaith organizing knowledge and skills as they help their host organization to better understand and connect to the religious diversity of the city in ways that complement their respective mission. ISIP will begin with a week-long field-based seminar on religion and civic engagement. Each day, interns will examine a particular religion (for example, Buddhism or Islam), the internal diversity to that religion, and the social and civic role that a given religion plays within its community and the wider public. There will be assigned readings with the syllabus also emphasizing personal encounter and discussion with grassroots religious leaders themselves. The goal of the week-long seminar is to provide a basic orientation to religious diversity, a sense of the religious landscape of New York City, the tools to approach religion for civic engagement, and a network for the students to begin their work. |
After the week-long seminar and at the start of the internships, facilitated, weekly, peer group meetings will take place to help students learn from each other’s experience. The meetings will periodically include presentations from civic and religious leaders.
Students will also produce a research paper about interfaith and civic engagement, using their host organization as their field site. Papers will not be graded, but will be supervised by Princeton faculty. There will be an opportunity for students to present their papers to one another and to their host organizations. The internship program will run for 9 weeks, beginning on June 3 and ending on August 1. All interns will receive a $450 stipend per week. Current host organizations for internship placements include:
For more information on the 2013 Interfaith Summer Internship Program, email Matt Weiner. |