To Make New York & The World Safe for Religious Diversity

The Interfaith Center of New York (ICNY) is a secular non-profit organization with a mission to “overcome prejudice, violence, and misunderstanding by activating the power of the city’s grassroots religious and civic leaders and their communities.”

Over the course of 25 years, ICNY has built the most religiously-diverse and civically-engaged network of grassroots and immigrant religious leaders across the five boroughs of Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island and The Bronx. These include Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Afro Caribbean, and Native American New Yorkers who have either attended one or more of NYC’s social justice retreats, participated in the religious diversity education programs for social workers, teachers, lawyers, and NYPD officers, or joined multi-faith advocacy work on immigration and religious freedom. ICNY’s decades of organizing and educating in New York City’s grassroots religious communities have gained trust, the basis for all their successes, which recently includes increasing turn-out for the 2020 US Census and galvanizing faith-community humanitarian response to the COVID-19.

The Interfaith Center of New York (ICNY) is also a non-governmental organization (affiliated with the United Nations Department of Public Information) helping to make New York an internationally recognized model of mutual understanding and cooperation among faith traditions.

In a city of 8 and a half million people speaking more than 200 languages, the ongoing challenges to religious pluralism include protecting religious freedom, balancing civil rights with heightened security concerns, countering hate speech and the prejudice that can lead to it, and providing welcome and civics education for immigrants arriving from other countries.

The Interfaith Center of New York (ICNY) addresses these challenges head on, by advocating for others and by bringing leaders from every faith to the forefront of the fight at hand.

The Interfaith Center of New York has long been committed to fighting Islamophobia. From 2012 to 2013, ICNY worked in coalition with T’ruah (formerly Rabbis for Human Rights North America), the Jewish Community Relations Council, United Methodist Women, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and Muslim Community Network to advocate successfully for disclaimers on anti-Muslim subway ads placed by the American Freedom Defense Initiative. More recently, ICNY submitted testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee questioning the premise of its hearings “Willful Blindness —The Consequences of Agency Efforts to De-Emphasize Radical Islam in Combating Terrorism.”

ICNY helps New Yorkers and others build relationships of mutual respect and understanding across faith lines.

Contacts

• Address: 475 Riverside Drive, Suite 540, New York, NY 10115, USA
• Phone: +1 (212) 870-3510
• Email: info@interfaithcenter.org
• Website: interfaithcenter.org