"When Students Lead: An Institutional Model for Student-Driven Interfaith Programming"

Campus interfaith work is often structured around professional staff designing programs for students. This presentation proposes a different model, more at home in student affairs, wherein students are the primary architects of interfaith encounter, and reflects on three years of implementation at a mid-size university. Several student office worker lines were reconceived as an "Interfaith Fellows" program, tasking students with designing programming rooted in their own identities and communities. One fellow's hosting of Ganesh Chaturthi revealed significant unmet demand for Hindu religious life that institutional structures had not previously addressed. A partnership with the student-led Dialogue Society produced monthly interfaith dinners averaging thirty attendees, centering structured conversation across religious difference in a format students shaped and sustained. This presentation reflects on what the model requires institutionally, what it makes possible pedagogically, and what it suggests about student agency and genuine interfaith encounter.