A long-running Melbourne program bringing together secondary students from Muslim, Jewish and Christian schools has closed due to a lack of funding and community tensions over the war in the Gaza.
The Building Bridges school interfaith program started in the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks and brought together year 10 and 11 students for a chat and pizza.
John Rogerson, chair of the WellSpring Centre, which ran the discontinued school interfaith program Building Bridges.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui
“These kids end up with friendships out of it,” said John Rogerson, chairman of the WellSpring Centre, a Christian organisation that ran Building Bridges until this year.
“We had one kid get up and say, ‘I never appreciated that people from other religions would have an AFL team they support’,” he said.
“It tells you what happens when we get out of our own bubbles. And that’s why the meals are so important, to have those conversations.”
Under the program, more than 200 students from 19 Christian, Muslim and Jewish schools would visit each other’s campuses and talk about their lives – not politics.
Volunteer facilitators, who had often themselves completed the program as students, would lead small group discussions on everything from the meaning of life, to the favourite parts of their religion and whether they would date outside of it. Later in the year, students, their parents and facilitators came together to celebrate.
But the program was cancelled this year after some schools pulled out due to tensions over the war in Gaza. Politicians and academics have expressed concerns that antisemitism and Islamophobia are on the rise in Australia, with many Jewish and Muslim leaders no longer engaging.
Natalie Adler, 25, enjoyed Building Bridges so much as a student that she became a facilitator and eventually program director. “It should be in all schools across Australia because we need people to engage with those they see as being different to themselves,” she said.
While the demise of the program still makes her sad, Sadler said she understood it was a huge ask for the students to have conversations that many adults considered too difficult.
Building Bridges should be in all Australian schools, says former facilitator Natalie Adler.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui
“Every religion teaches love, respect and tolerance. We need to show students how to actually do that, even when it’s difficult,” she said.
Reverend Hans Christiansen was until recently senior chaplain at Melbourne Grammar School, which participated in the program alongside Bialik College, Caulfield Grammar and Minaret College and others.
“We need it now more than ever,” said Christiansen, who is now assistant bishop in the Perth diocese.
“There was so much movement post-9/11 in our society and so much goodness to create harmony between cultures. And sadly now with the Gaza conflict, all of that we’ve seen can so quickly unravel.”
Christiansen said Building Bridges was an “incredibly successful interfaith program which fostered the building of relationships among thousands of young people”. Many students said it was one of the best things they had done at school because they got to know people they normally wouldn’t meet, he said.
The Faith Communities Council of Victoria’s multi-faith officer, Sandy Kouroupidis, said governments poured money into interfaith cohesion in the aftermath of 9/11 and the Bali bombings. But he said this had petered out over the past eight years as money went into other areas such as family violence.
“Issues that are currently going on overseas and the spot fires we’re currently putting out in Australia – it’s not something of the past, it’s something of the present,” Kouroupidis said.
Rogerson said the program had been funded by schools paying to participate and a US donor with connections to WellSpring. He said the WellSpring Centre needed $150,000 a year to train and pay volunteer facilitators, and expand to other faiths and schools.
“We either do it properly or we stop it forever. And the message we’ve had since we stopped it is: ‘Don’t do this, we need this’,” he said.
The Victorian government said the state was known for its multiculturalism and schools played a “critical role in strengthening multicultural inclusion in our community by providing an environment where acceptance of diversity, knowledge of other cultures and an understanding of global and local issues can be developed”.
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