Sharon - a professional suburb of Boston with a large Jewish population and growing communities of Muslims and Hindus - was playing host to a group of diverse young people from the Middle East. The community couldn’t figure out what activities to plan for these youth, and Janet, a member of the Jewish community, said in exasperation that if they couldn’t agree on what do with the international visitors, maybe the young people should take the lead.

To everyone’s surprise, they did – and planned a wildly successful program (also, to people’s surprise).

It turned out all the young people needed was an opportunity to plan and lead a program of significance themselves.

And that became the spark for growth for Interfaith Action’s Youth Leadership Program – a group of over fifty young people from the Sharon’s many faith and ethnic communities who come together twice a month to plan interfaith programs for the whole community. The trick is providing young people with the tools to run a sophisticated enterprise – skill-building seminars in how to run meetings, facilitate difficult dialogues, plan large events, etc – and then turning the keys over to them.

Community-wide Iftars – the meal that breaks the fast during the month of Ramadan – are becoming increasingly common across the country. In Sharon, young people of Interfaith Action organized an Iftar at a local synagogue to celebrate the confluence of the sacred seasons of Ramadan, the Jewish High Holy Days, and the Hindu festival of Navaratri. Last year 400 people from many faith traditions joined together for a large meal and interfaith conversation. (Check out a great video on the Interfaith Action youth program.)

Sharon has its share of visiting foreign dignitaries, and it is often this youth leadership group who organizes the community conversations with, for example, senior Imams from the Middle East and Uzbekistan.

They have facilitated more than one difficult dialogue about religion between adults in Sharon who might not otherwise talk, and go into local middle and high schools to teach classes on building respect across religious boundaries. Last year, they worked with Harvard and Diana Eck to run a regional high school conference on religious differences, and politely told the adults that only young people were invited in the room.

“It was great,” Janet told me. “At least that’s what the kids told me.”

And if you think that leafy suburbs like Sharon don’t have problems with ethnic and religious discrimination, you should go see one of Sharon’s high school sports teams compete. Fans from other schools have thrown pennies at them and shouted slurs like “towel heads”. The truth is that programs that bring people from different backgrounds together are required everywhere from inner cities to rural areas to professional suburbs. Every community should have interfaith youth projects.

Wendy Kopp of Teach for America often says that one of the most important results of her program is the long-term impact it has on the participants – they are life-long agents of educational change. The current Chancellor of the DC public schools, Michelle Rhee, is a Teach for America graduate.

Same with Interfaith Action in Sharon, MA. Beyond the immediate and profound impact that these young people are having in their own community, they are gaining invaluable experience and skills as interfaith bridge builders - experience and skills they will take wherever they go.

I’ve gotten to know one of the graduates of the program well, Mike Garber, who is now a student at George Washington University. As a high schooler in Sharon, Mike facilitated dialogue between Orthodox Jews and traditional Muslims in his home. As a college student, he is building interfaith programs on his campus, and is taking leadership in broader Washington DC and national interfaith youth efforts.

In ten or twenty years, Mike Garber may well be a diplomat defusing a faith-based conflict in India, Sri Lanka or the Middle East.

You would think that Janet Penn, Mike Garber and Interfaith Action in Sharon have all the money they need to hire a staff, pay for events, send their youth leaders to conferences and perhaps fund a few college scholarships. After all, what’s more important than training young people to be interfaith bridge-builders in their own communities, and inspiring them towards a vocation of building religious pluralism.

Alas, that’s not the case. Janet and her colleagues are largely volunteers. Interfaith Action in Sharon, while it has grown dramatically over the past few years and continues to have impressive achievements, continues to run on a shoestring budget.

Too often, people expect the folks who train interfaith bridge-builders, especially in youth programs, to make do on bake sales.

Just remember, as people like Janet Penn make do on Scooby snacks, there is a religious extremist out there who is doubling his youth program. He is identifying likely kids for the work of religious bigotry and violence. His recruiters are talking to them right now. They are sending them to training camps where they are being brainwashed in religious hatred, preparing to be deployed to wreak havoc who knows where.

And every time that religious extremist entrepreneur asks for money for his youth program, he gets it – to the tune of millions of dollars.

There is an interfaith youth movement out there to be built – a movement that can compete for the imagination and energy of the emerging generation. But unless we invest in people like Janet Penn and in programs like Interfaith Action, we will continue to see our headlines dominated by young people killing each other to the soundtrack of prayer instead of young people pointing to a new world of peace and pluralism and leading us there.