What do a Jewish student, a Muslim student and a Catholic student have in common? They will all engage in community service together through a fellowship that’s a first at George Washington University.
The Bridging Service Fellowship is a yearlong program created by Hillel International and Repair the World that aims to connect mostly sophomores and juniors in college through community service, interfaith dialogue and leadership training.
“The Bridging Service Fellowship equips students to lead with empathy, confidence and curiosity in an increasingly divided world while actively serving their community,” Dani Levine, Hillel International’s senior director of impact, said in an August news release.
After a successful pilot year, the fellowship has expanded from more than 100 fellows across 10 college campuses to more than 200 fellows across 16 campuses, which now includes GW. In true interfaith fashion, staff from GW Hillel and GW’s Center for Interfaith & Spiritual Life will cofacilitate the cohort of 10.
Fellows will engage in ethical volunteer service, cohort learning and peer and small-group bridge-building for the duration of the program.
“The goal of this is to get students more out of their comfort zone a little bit and into working with communities that they might not have worked with before,” GW Hillel’s community engagement manager Noah Scholl said.
The application deadline for fellows closed Sept. 14. Scholl and the university chaplain, the Rev. Kristen Glass Perez, will next sort through the applications and decide on 10 fellows — five Jewish and five non-Jewish.
“We have a great number of applicants,” Scholl said.
Their first major event is participating in the InterFaith Council of Metropolitan Washington’s annual Unity Walk on Oct. 25.
“We’re going to do some events with a Buddhist temple, with a Muslim community and I think some kind of dialogue work with a community at Howard [University], potentially,” Scholl said. “It’s a lot of creating opportunities for students who might not necessarily have come across each other in normal day-to-day campus life to build a larger GW community.”
Each of the 10 fellows is expected to complete various acts of service learning throughout the year.
“It’s both community learning and participating in conversations and text studies and other opportunities to explore different issues of identity and community on campus,” Scholl said. “And then there’s going to be volunteering with community organizations in D.C. and around GW.”
In the past, GW Hillel has worked with nonprofits Martha’s Table and We Are CASA, and GW’s own Honey W. Nashman Center for Civic Engagement and Public Service. The group also allows for fellows to pursue their interests, such as one student who suggested visiting senior living facilities on holidays.
“The whole point is to empower students to look into their own communities or the GW community and see areas that are important to them,” Scholl said. “They’re encouraged to think openly about it and what direction they can take.”
In brainstorming what this inaugural GW cohort will look like, the word “mosaic” came up frequently in Scholl’s and Glass Perez’s conversation.
“How do we build a picture of the campus that is all these mini snapshots that all come together and form a bigger one?” Scholl asked.
He said he’ll try to choose applicants from both the main D.C. campus and the satellite Mount Vernon campus.
“I’ve been trying to find as large of a spread as possible, and find students who are passionate and who are interested,” Scholl said.
He hopes the Bridging Service Fellowship becomes a returning tradition for GW Hillel.
“We would love for this year to be a pilot for how successful campus bridge-building can be, especially when it’s taken out of more political realms and more pushed into community service and shared values,” Scholl said.
“My biggest hope is that [fellows] make a friend that wasn’t someone they knew before,” he added. “If you don’t know anyone in a group, it’s a lot easier to categorize them as something or generalize [the group]. But if you feel like you have personal connections, it makes the larger bridge-building a lot easier.”
A lasting example of such bridge-building on campus began a few years ago: the president of GW’s Jewish Student Association at the time was friends and roommates with the president of the Catholic Student Union.
The two friends launched GW’s annual Jewish Student Association versus Catholic Student Union basketball game in the spring.
“Now, it is seen as a tradition, and freshmen are talking about playing for the Matzah Ballers, but a couple years ago, nobody knew about that,” Scholl said. “It just started because two girls were friends and roommates, then were like, ‘This would be fun.’”
zbell@midatlanticmedia.com
