Club combines religious tolerance, service

By Lydia Smith     1/16/13 6:00pm

 

One of Rice University's newest clubs aims to unite students of different faiths by engaging in service projects in the Houston area. 

Better Together was started at Rice last summer as a chapter of the Better Together campaign created by Interfaith Youth Core, a larger national organization whose founder, Eboo Patel, is also a part of of President Barack Obama's inaugural Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. 

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According to the campaign's website, the Better Together campaign aims to promote religious tolerance on campus and engage students through conversation while acting together to confront common issues that impact the community. 

The Rice chapter of Better Together is led by Brown College senior Lara Wik, Lovett College junior Eric Talbert and Will Rice College sophomore Shayak Sengupta. 

Executive Director of Rice's Boniuk Center for the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance Mike Pardee said the center has been supportive of this new club. 

"To the extent that the Boniuk Center focuses its efforts on promoting tolerance and service among students, the club's events represent student-centered initiative at its best," Pardee said. "The program was conceived entirely by Rice students, and they have been the driving [force] behind coordinating the events." 

Sengupta said the club has already engaged with the Houston community during its first year. 

"We had many events this past semester, from writing letters to victims of crimes stemming from religious intolerance to a movie screening about religious misunderstanding after 9/11," Sengupta said. "We also took a volunteer trip where we helped build a prayer garden in the lot of a former church in Houston's Freedmen's Town." 

Talbert said the Freedmen's Town project engaged Rice students with people from Houston. 

"We've really connected with the Freedmen's Town restoration movement due to our similar missions of promoting human rights awareness," Talbert said. "Working on their prayer garden was a perfect project for our interfaith movement." 

Sengupta said another successful community project was the group's visit to the Houston Food Bank in the fall. 

"The trip to the food bank was definitely a worthwhile experience," Sengupta said. "It was pretty cool to see so many people of faith and non-faith traditions come out and do something meaningful for the community." 

The club's next event will be an interfaith dialogue and hunger awareness simple meal for students Saturday, Jan. 19 in the Brown Commons to benefit the food bank, Wik said. 

Led by Wik, Talbert and Sengupta, this will be one of the Better Together Rice chapter's main events of the semester and has been in the planning stages since this past summer, Wik said. 

According to the Boniuk Center Blog, Better Together participated in an Interfaith Youth Core Leadership Conference at the University of Pennsylvania over the summer and, after competing against 30 other schools, won a $250 scholarship to launch the event and advertising campaign. 

Talbert said the goal of this event is to bring together members of different faith backgrounds and establish a common forum for people to talk about issues valued by all religions, such as feeding the hungry. 

"The great thing about this dinner is that it generates dialogue about both faith and social issues," Talbert said. 

Wik said the event will consist of a simple catered meal, equivalent to what someone in poverty would be able to afford, followed by a discussion. 

"Given that this weekend is Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, it seems especially relevant to come together to share our differences in the hope of creating a more peaceful and integrated community on Rice's campus," Wik said. 

As seen on the event's Facebook page, Rice students have volunteered to participate in the advertising campaign for this event by modeling for posters holding signs stating their religious identity and why they care about hunger in Houston. According to Wik, students are invited to continue the campaign and post their own photos on the Facebook event online. 

Tickets for Saturday's event, beginning at 6 p.m. in the Brown Commons, can be purchased for $5 or in exchance for a donation of two cans of food at the door. The event is open to anyone in the Rice community. 

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