San Diego Regional Interfaith Collaborative

Today our San Diego Community is confronting numerous challenges - providing short-term support for the unhoused while generating long-term solutions. Protecting God's creation and promoting climate justice. Advancing racial justice and equity in policing, meeting the immediate needs and supporting the long-term resettlement of refugees and immigrants seeking a better life. 

Fortunately, San Diego's faith communities have the potential to help address all these challenges and more. For the past six years, the San Diego Regional Interfaith Collaborative (SDRIC) has been providing our neighbors throughout the county with the information, inspiration, and connections needed to take action. 

We need your help to continue providing this critical support to the diverse faith communities across all of San Diego County. 

SDRIC brings together faith leaders and lay leaders in the interfaith community to learn from individuals who are on the front lines of managing critical issues that affect our San Diego community. These encounters spark inspiration to action, showcase clear paths to get involved, and provide the space for interfaith collaboration with government agencies and community organizations. 

Beginning in 2015, SDRIC has hosted biannual events bringing attention to critical issues in our community and providing the information, inspiration, and connections faith communities need to get involved in addressing these issues.

When we were able to hold in-person gatherings, attendees would sit in groups with others from their specific geographic community so they could get to know one another, establish connections, and develop collaborations. After keynote speakers and panel discussions would address the entire gathering, we then commence into breakout sessions where attendees can deepen their connections with others from their specific community and learn more about the individuals, organizations, and government agencies who are already actively at work there. We encourage attendees to find out how they and their faith communities can best support the presenters' efforts during these breakout sessions as we build a movement of people working together. 

Topics featured at past gatherings have included:

• Government Innovations to End Homelessness and How Faith Communities Can Help
• Responding to Traumatic Experiences: A Toolbox for Faith Leaders
• Family Violence: A Pandemic Within the Pandemic
• Equity in Climate Justice: A Religious Response
• Building Inclusive Communities in an Era of Hate, Isolations and Radicalization
• Religious Communities in the Borderlands: What is Our Responsibility?
• Challenges and Opportunities for Law Enforcement in Building Community Relations
• Explore Troubling Experiences of People of Color with Law Enforcement: An Interfaith Conversation
• What You Don't Know About Homelessness and What You Can Do To Help
• Bridges to Action on Human Trafficking

We are about creating space for communication, compassion and collaboration by:

1. Neutrally convening conversations that matter among inter-religious communities and relating organizations
2. Supporting them in perceiving the "bigger picture" with regard to the issues and resources of the greater San Diego region
3. Evoking mutual creative energy that initiates fellowship, celebration, understanding, strategic planning and action within its multiple partners

Our next event, scheduled for September 20, 2022, will address the topic of Opioid Addiction, Fentanyl, and Overdoses. We hope you will join us in Bettering the San Diego Region Through Multireligious Cooperation.