Community Building

Fostering strong, healthy communities is at the core of URI’s work.
Youth for Peace CC's summer school in Bosnia and Herzegovina

URI encourages people to help each other by reaching across religious, ethnic, and cultural lines, creating a culture of respect and safety that fosters peace even during difficult times.

Examples of our work in this Action Area:

  • In Pakistan, the URI MCC Islamabad office works for inter-religious peace by addressing local Muslims' and Christians' joint need for necessities like roads, sewage systems, gas and water
  • In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Youth for Peace CC's summer school brought together young people from different backgrounds to serve their community through volunteering efforts like helping disadvantaged families, painting houses, and repairing old cemeteries
  • After a Helsinki mosque was vandalized, URI members from the URI Multiregion formed an interfaith group to clean it, sending a strong message that they would not allow their community to be divided
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Stories

World Environment Day demands actions, not words

Asia
Community Building
Environment
Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation

By URI Peace Group of Journalists (URI Kashmir) CC

Muzaffarbad, 5th June 2011

Peace Group of Journalists (URI Kashmir) has called upon all stakeholders, including the government to make a collective effort towards implementing the UN 1997 Kyoto Protocol on the environment. The UN has declared 2011 the World Year of the Forests. At the time of independence, Pakistan had 25% forest cover, but according to statistics this has fallen below 2.5% landmass with forest cover. The 2010 historic flood that devastated Pakistan and the State of Kashmir, leaving behind a trail of destruction affecting 21 million, is largely attributed to deforestation by the timber mafia. It is therefore critical for Pakistan and State of Kashmir to protect the forests before they disappear altogether with serious consequences.

DEVELOPING MODERN SPRITUAL PRACTICES

North America
Community Building
Interfaith and Intercultural Dialogue
Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation

There are many kinds of spiritual practice.  Most of them are derived from one of the major religions.  Spiritual practices of this kind tend to be based on teachings from one of the earlier civilizations.  Some of these practices are very profound and deserving of our attention.  On the other hand, we live in the beginnings of a global age, one which has teachings coming from different civilizations of the past and, at the same time, needing to be relevant to this age.  Each new civilization will be a combination of older teachings and teachings born of the age now coming into being.  It is in the integration of past, present, and future that a civilization gains its completeness.

Freedom Riders - Stepping Up

North America
Policy Advocacy
Community Building

Last night I witnessed a burst of historic heroic citizenship in the USA when I watched a PBS special program called The Freedom Riders. In 1961 racism was ugly, mean, unjust, and embedded in American society. Southern states enforced Jim Crow legislation and local police enforced segregated sitting rooms in bus and railroad stations in cities across the South.