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Americans are more likely to encounter religious diversity in their workplaces than in any other sphere of life. In an era defined by polarization, successful leaders recognize this diversity as both a challenge and an opportunity: acknowledging that team members hold fundamentally different worldviews while identifying the shared values that strengthen their team culture.

Interfaith America CEO Adam Phillips and distinguished leaders from business and healthcare discussed this at Dare to Overcome, May 20-22, 2025. They shared powerful stories of interfaith leadership and proven strategies for transforming religious diversity into a competitive advantage through meaningful inclusion and cooperation.

Video: Report at Washington DC Dare to Overcome Conference, May 2025. 

By Brian Grim

Below is a summary of visiting 4 of the 10 schools in India that participated in our “Human Rights & Business Skills” secondary school curriculum pilot. We supplemented the curriculum, which is based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Indian Constitution, with business skills that reinforce and apply the human rights.

Roundtable (February 2025)

MIT World Peace University School of Education professors and student teachers kicked off the week with a roundtable demonstrating how they adapted the curriculum to the Indian context and piloted the curriculum (see the picture above). The professors include the department head Dr Shalini Tonpe, Asst Prof Rahul Landge and Asst Prof Priya Kale.

The Roundtable conference began with Asst Prof Rahul Landge, in the picture below, reading a comprehensive report on the implementation of human rights curriculum, which was piloted across different schools of Pune city. The report provided valuable insights into curriculum’s execution, identified opportunities for growth, highlighted the challenges encountered, and included series of accountable recommendations for enhancing future efforts. This review played a crucial role in assessing the curriculum impact its adaptability within diverse educational settings.

The human rights were very well received, and each of the 10 school principals were especially attracted to the practical business skills tied to higher values. Asst Prof Priya Kale, in the photo below, shows that while none of the schools has a business skills curriculum and only four are aware of such a curriculum, they all would like to implement such a curriculum in their schools.

The team’s student teachers demonstrated as part of the roundtable four of the 10 human rights lessons that they piloted in the fall: Freedom of Religion, Protection from Child Labor, Right to Marriage and Family, and Freedom from Bullying.

In the Schools

The class teacher at Anjuman Islam Peer Mohamed High School – Pune, an all-girls Muslim school (pictured below, bottom right), gave a ringing endorsement after the demonstration lesson, Freedom from Bullying. She and the chief school administrator invited us to implement the curriculum on an ongoing basis.

At a Punbe school for underprivileged students, the Bharati Vidyapeet School, the pilot was on the fundamental human right to Marriage and Family. The class was executed effectively, with a variety of engaging activities designed to raise awareness about this right. Students actively participated in role-playing exercises, group discussions and case studies, which helped them explore marriage laws, family dynamics and personal freedoms.

A highlight was the performance of one of the 10 original songs written by one of the Hindu student teachers. He partnered with a Christian student teacher (both pictured below) to write the songs to go with each of the 10 lessons.

At a prep school attached to MIT WPU, the pilot class on Religious Freedom was animated through “gamification” – using games and competition to motivate learning. In one game, teams competed to see who could find the most similarities between India’s multiple religions. My minor but really fun part was to come on stage and hand out the awards.

The final demonstration pilot was at a tutoring center giving evening classes for underprivileged students. The center is an act of love by a husband and wife team who offer daily coaching classes on English and math as well as other subjects as needed. The lesson was one that hits close to home for these students: Freedom from Bullying.

The Impact and Next Steps

Comments from students ranged from, “I didn’t realize we had universal rights at birth,” to coming up for strategies on how to combat discrimination.

We are working towards sustainability and expansion of the initiative across India and worldwide through Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) funding. Indian companies must spend a minimum of 2% of their average net profit over the preceding three years on CSR activities.

In recognition of the leadership making this pilot possible, we will be conferring the Global Business & Interfaith Peace Gold Medal to MIT-WPU’s Executive President, Dr. Rahul V. Karad (pictured below, center). The award will take place during our upcoming Dare to Overcome conference in Washington DC on May 20-22, 2025.

I made the announcement of this prestigious award during MIT-WPU’s Executive Board meeting. Also present was the founder, Revered Prof (Dr.) Vishwanath D. Karad. He established the university’s guiding principle based on the teachings of India’s Noble Son Swami Vivekananda, “The union of science and spirituality will bring peace and harmony to mankind.”

Leading figures from the worlds of AI and religious liberty – a senior fellow at Microsoft, co-lead of Accenture’s AI for Good initiative, an evangelical leader, and an AI researcher – explore the rapid development of AI and its growing, multifaceted impacts on religious liberty in the United States and abroad.

The discussion examines the risks AI poses to humanity, especially to religious pluralism and freedom of thought and practice, as well as the potential opportunities for AI tools to serve the flourishing of religious communities across the world.

The session also considered how religious leaders can engage more in the broader discourse around AI governance and development, what safeguards and mechanisms might help to prevent AI from being used to surveil or suppress religious minorities, and what responsibilities AI companies might have to consult with religious stakeholders when designing systems that may affect spiritual life or expression.

We are thrilled that the 6th National Faith@Work ERG Conference — cohosted by RFBF and the Busch School of Business at The Catholic University of America — has a fantastic group of sponsors from corporations and civil society partners, including Platinum Sponsor The Future of Life Institute.

Panellists:

– Suhail A. Khan – Suhail Khan serves as Director of External Affairs at Microsoft Corporation and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Global Engagement, a Christian religious freedom think tank. Khan served as a policy advisor and counsel on Capitol Hill, and a senior political appointee with the Bush administration, where he served in the White House and as an advisor for two cabinet secretaries. He was awarded the U.S. DOT Secretary’s Team Award in 2005 and the Gold Medal for Outstanding Achievement in 2007. Khan was awarded the Young Conservative Coalition’s Buckley Award in 2010.

– Rev. Johnnie Moore – Rev. Moore is the founder and CEO of The KAIROS Company, now part of JDA Worldwide, and President of The Congress of Christian Leaders. He was twice a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom serving during the Trump and Biden administrations. Previously, Rev. Moore was Senior Vice President and campus pastor at Liberty University, and Chief of Staff and Vice President of Faith Content for the United Artists Media Group in Hollywood.

– Max Tegmark, Ph.D. – Max Tegmark is an AI professor and researcher at MIT, and the founder and president of the Future of Life Institute (FLI) and the Improve the News Foundation. Tegmark’s most recent AI safety research focuses on mechanistic interpretability and provably safe AI. He is the author of over 300 publications as well as the New York Times bestsellers “Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” and “Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality”. In 2023, Time Magazine named him one of the 100 Most Influential People in AI 2023.

– Will Jones (moderator) – Will is a Futures Program Associate at the Future of Life Institute (FLI), lead FLI’s work to amplifying faith perspectives on AI issues and opportunities and supporting religious leaders to steer AI in a better direction for their communities. Jones graduated with First Class Honours in English from the University of Cambridge.

MIT-WPU’s Dr. Rahul Karad Honoured with 2025 Global Business and Interfaith Peace Award at Prestigious International Forum in Washington, D.C

Washington, D.C : Dr. Rahul Vishwanath Karad, Executive president MIT World Peace University, was recently awarded the 2025 Global Business and Interfaith Peace Award at the Inaugural IRF Builders Forum & Roger Williams IRF Awards Dinner held in Washington, D.C.

Organized by the International Religious Freedom Secretariat, the two-day forum brought together individuals and institutions working to promote religious freedom and mutual understanding across communities and cultures. The award recognizes individuals who have made meaningful contributions at the intersection of business, education, and interfaith peacebuilding. Read full article.

Also see article by India Education Diary.

Brian Grim shares his calling to be a missionary when he was only 4-years-old and how that eventually led him to Catholicism, but also a life as an educator in the former Soviet Union, China, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe from 1982-2002. Eventually his research in economics reveals that religious freedom is good for business. Brian J. Grim, Ph. D. (Penn State), is the founding president of the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation and works with Fortune 500 companies to include religion and belief as part of their belonging initiatives.

By Brian Grim

I’m thrilled to be working with Lawrence Chong, Group CEO of Consulus, who is organizing this year’s Shape the World Summit in Rome in collaboration with the Vatican.

The summit will include the global launch of an AI-Powered Common Growth Fund for Social and Faith-Based Enterprises.

In partnership with the FoRB Foundation, the launch will be witnessed by Cardinal Luis A Tagle and David Smith, MP, the UK’s Special Envoy for Freedom of Religion or Belief. The initiative will also integrate our Faith-Friendly Workplace “REDI” Index as a benchmarking tool.

See the whole program here.

Report: Religious freedom increasing in workplace By Michaela Estruth in The Heartlander

Report Shows Despite DEI Cuts, Religious Inclusion is Improving at Fortune 500 Companies By Kathryn Post in RNS

Religion on the Rise at Fortune 500 Companies by MovieGuide

Survey: Fortune 500 companies becoming more religious-friendly by Hannah Hiester on CatholicVote

Faith at Work: Accenture Leads the Charge as Corporate America Redefines Religious Inclusion| ZENIT – English, The World Seen From Rome

The impact of religious dialogue on the international recognition of Kazakhstan | DKNews International News Agency

Brian Grim will participate in a Cross Cultural Religious Literacy (CCRL) Summit in Krakow, Poland, in early June. The Summit will seek to develop best practices and chart new possibilities for CCRL and is convened by the Templeton Religion Trust, Love Your Neighbor Community, and The Review of Faith & International Affairs.

As summarized in “Toward a Global Covenant of Peaceable Neighborhood,”

Covenantal pluralism is simultaneously about “top-down” legal and policy parameters and “bottom-up” cultural norms and practices. A world of covenantal pluralism is characterized both by a constitutional order of equal rights and responsibilities and by a culture of reciprocal commitment to engaging, respecting, and protecting the other— albeit without necessarily conceding equal veracity or moral equivalence to the beliefs and behaviors of others. The envisioned end-state is neither a thin-soup ecumenism nor vague syncretism, but rather a positive, practical, non-relativistic pluralism. It is a paradigm of civic fairness and human solidarity, a covenant of global neighborliness….

Covenantal Pluralism has three key constitutive dimensions: (1) freedom of religion and belief (including equal treatment of all people, of any faith or none), (2) cross-cultural religious literacy, and (3) character virtues essential for living constructively with deep difference.

The practice of CCRL presupposes, embodies, and expresses all of these dimensions. CCRL is a framework of engagement bringing religious freedom and religious responsibility together; that is, it brings equal citizens together to take take on our world’s greatest challenges, building dynamic and resilient societies, and states, as a result. In other words, the core commodity of CCRL is trust— it usually begins in the transactional, but if sustained, becomes transformational. Put one last way: CCRL builds teachers who embody an empathetic and elicitive engagement methodology, as demonstrated in the “classroom” (of life), that ripples across the campus, community, culture, and country.

Congratulations to Accenture for being the most faith-friendly workplace among Global Fortune 500 companies in 2025! This is the 6th annual Faith-Friendly Workplace REDI Index published by the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation, and the 3rd time Accenture has taken or tied for the top spot.

This year, a record number of global companies participated, including those based in the U.K., and for the first time, in the Middle East. The REDI Index has 11 indicators of best practices including having faith-and-belief employee resource groups (ERGs), sharing best practices with other companies, and honoring holy days of their employees, among other accommodations such as dress and diet.

Leaders from Accenture’s interfaith network gathered in Washington DC last week to be recognized for their work in creating workplaces where people can bring their whole “self” to work, including their faith.

Learn more about faith-and-belief friendly workplaces here.

The Religious Freedom & Business Foundation Is thrilled to announce that Glenda Cameron is the 2025 ERG Leader of the Year.

Glenda is recognized for her extraordinary service and pioneering impact — not only within her own companies (EMC and now Dell Technologies) — but also in helping other companies on their journeys toward more religiously inclusive, faith-friendly workplaces for people of all faith and beliefs.

When DELL and DELL merged in 2016, Glenda was leading EMC’s interfaith ERG, but DELL had no such ERG. As the merger was being fleshed out, Glenda was the Interfaith ERG champion that brought EMC’s interfaith ERG to DELL. And thanks to Glenda’s pioneering work, DELL has become the third most Faith-friendly business among Fortune 500 companies today.

Leaders of Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) do so as volunteers in addition to their main jobs.