Permanent link for Announcing Shared Leadership of the Kaufman Interfaith Institute on July 11, 2023

The Kaufman Interfaith Institute is pleased to announce some new developments in our organizational structure as we move forward into the next academic year.  Effective this month the leadership will be shared with Douglas Kindschi serving as the Sylvia and Richard Kaufman Founding Director, and Kyle Kooyers serving as the Director of Operations.  I will continue responsibility for budget, serve as appointing officer for staff, and take on an advisory role for planning and fund raising. I will also assist during the transition of the ongoing leadership for the Institute.

I am particularly pleased to continue working with Kyle Kooyers, who has been serving as the Associate Director for the past few years. His new role as Director of Operations will involve much of what he has already been doing so successfully but will signal his expanded responsibilities as we transition leadership. He will introduce himself further in his statement below.

- Doug Kindschi, Sylvia and Richard Kaufman Founding Director, Kaufman Interfaith Institute

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I am so very honored to be a part of this team and humbled to be stepping into this role. Since the beginning of my time with the Institute in 2016, I have found this work of human connection, interfaith understanding, and collective transformation to be deeply formative and immensely inspiring. Community organizing has been a common thread throughout my personal journey. The life and energy I find in interfaith collaboration and cooperation is truly without match. As I reflect over this past program year, there’s one phrase, offered by one of our attendees at our Rabbi Sigal Interfaith Leadership Lecture featuring Valarie Kaur, that keeps coming to mind… “Now I feel like I can breathe.”

For a woman of color, whose adoptive parents were white and whose late brother was native American, Valarie’s framework for Revolutionary Love, as she said, “explains my experience and my brother’s and my life. He always fought through life because there was such extreme prejudice and white supremacy behaviors towards us. So never got to that part where he could breathe. And when you said to imagine an ancestor behind you, I instantly saw him behind me. And he is from the Ottawa Tribe. So, I felt him saying, ‘Thank you for acknowledging me.’  He was never acknowledged. He was always acknowledged as an opponent. He always had rage. He always fought. And I grieved for him. Now I feel like I can breathe.”  

Spaces of deep personal and communal transformation, spaces where people can feel seen and understood, do not happen simply because one has reserved a room, invited a speaker, brought in students, faculty, staff, and community members, and worked diligently with conference and events to curate a lovely room set-up and some tasty food. While critically important, the logistical labor is not what makes a gathering of people life changing. That is achieved by the work of human hearts:

• Cultivating trust born out of sustained and mutual relationships.
• Giving land and labor acknowledgement to the people it’s due.
• Forging agreements to enter healthy conversation across difference with the expectation that each person with leave having grown, hearing a new perspective, seeing a similarity, growing in understanding, making a new friendship, changing an old attitude for one of admiration.
• Honoring the distinctiveness or our cultures, traditions, beliefs, and lived experiences as well as celebrating that which we hold in common.
• Naming the realities of power and privilege, along with the ways in which here in the United States and around the world religious, spiritual, and secular communities are complicit in systems of oppression and violence AND at the same time, are also the ones who are leading the work for peace, understanding, equity, and justice.
• Listening to and dreaming with one another about a world we’ll be proud to hand off to the next generation while also ensuring they have a place at the table.

Whether it’s creating spaces for joy - like our International Interfaith Concert featuring ensembles from Israel and Afghanistan or the Annual Interfaith Thanksgiving Celebration for an evening of gratitude and love - perhaps, we can feel like we can breathe.

Whether it’s creating spaces for grief, mourning, and remembering - like the Community Interfaith Memorial Services or hosting Remembrance in Action, two art exhibitions and film screenings that bring to the fore the horror of the Holocaust and the need to resist hate - perhaps, we can feel like we can breathe.

Whether it’s developing spaces for listening and support - like Talking Together, a year-long program to address and heal toxic polarization on our campus and in our community or working to implement processes, programs, and resources, to ensure that our students, faculty, and staff feel a deep sense of belonging in their respective religious, spiritual, or secular identity on campus - perhaps, we can feel like we can breathe.

Whether it’s investing in the next generation - like running our Youth Interfaith Service Day Camp bringing together middle and high school youth from around West Michigan to engage in interfaith and cross-cultural understanding and service or mentoring and resourcing those students as they take the reins of the Interfaith Movement through our Kaufman Interfaith Leadership Scholars program - perhaps, we can feel like we can breathe.

All of these initiatives and programs, these spaces of transformational, happen as a direct result of the inspiring and compassionate team that is the Kaufman staff. Week to week, month to month, they engage in the hard work of doing the heart work that makes interfaith understanding and cooperation possible. We joke that our spaces may not look as pretty or polished as larger institutes and centers, but, make no mistake, they are life changing. It takes a very special group of people to time and time again offer programing and space where people are seen, where people feel understood, where our stories are shared, and where the focus of the event isn’t so much to be self-aggrandizing and breathtaking but to be grounded in a revolutionary sense of love that is ultimately breath-giving.

As we look to the future and seek to live into GVSU’s Reach Higher 2025 values - a commitment to Inquiry, to an Inclusive & Equitable Community, to Innovation, to Integrity, and to International Perspectives – these commitments will continue to remain at the fore of our programming because they are first and foremost embodied and exemplified by our staff. It is a profound joy and blessing to be a part of this team.

Thank you for your continued partnership and for all of you who have invested me and in the work of the Institute. I look forward to all that is to come and am eager to connect over coffee/tea or by hosting you here in our new office space!

- Kyle Kooyers, Director of Operations, Kaufman Interfaith Institute

Posted on Permanent link for Announcing Shared Leadership of the Kaufman Interfaith Institute on July 11, 2023.