Interfaith America Founder, President Eboo Patel Receives Stubblefield Institute Civility Award for Community Service
Eboo Patel, founder and president of Interfaith America, a Chicago-based international nonprofit that aims to promote interfaith cooperation, received a Newsweek-Stubblefield Institute Civility Award in the category of Community Leader, earlier this month. Under Patel’s leadership, Interfaith America has worked with governments, universities, private companies, and civic organizations to make faith a bridge of cooperation rather than a barrier of division.
The annual award was established in 2022 to encourage productive political conversations across the nation. This year the institute has partnered with Newsweek, to present the Newsweek-Stubblefield Institute Civility Awards. The Bonnie and Bill Stubblefield Institute for Civil Political Communications was founded at Shepherd University in 2019.
“Eboo Patel is a national leader in overcoming divides to better our communities, states, and nation. He has worked to help schools, workplaces, and communities learn to use diversity of faith as a strength rather than a source of division,” said Ashley Horst, Stubblefield Institute executive director. “We are pleased to honor Mr. Patel with a Newsweek-Stubblefield Institute Civility Award and hope that his example inspires others to seek opportunities for collaboration across differences.”
Named one of “America’s Best Leaders” by US News & World Report in 2009, Patel served on President Obama’s Inaugural Faith Council, has given hundreds of keynote addresses, and has written five books, including “We Need to Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy.” He is an Ashoka Fellow and holds a doctorate in the sociology of religion from Oxford University, where he studied on a Rhodes Scholarship. He earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
It was during his college years that Patel first became interested in religions diversity and found inspiration in the legacy of his “first faith hero,” Dorothy Day, leader of the Catholic Worker movement. After completing his undergraduate degree, he embraced the role of advocate and activist, teaching at an alternative education program for high school dropouts in Chicago and founding a cooperative living community for activists and artists in the city’s Uptown neighborhood.
As a doctorate student at Oxford, Patel organized youth for several interfaith organizations in India, Sri Lanka and South Africa. Recognizing the significance of the convergence of faith, service and diversity, he developed the idea for an organization that would unite young people of different religious beliefs around service and dialogue. His idea, cultivated through his relationship with Brother Wayne Teasdale, a Catholic monk and social justice advocate, and blessed by the Dalai Lama, led to the Interfaith Youth Core, which he cofounded in 2002 with a $35,000 grant from the Ford Foundation.
Patel lives in Chicago with his wife, Shehnaz, and their two sons.