By Brian Grim

Today, the White House hosted a listening session to inform the upcoming national strategy to counter antisemitism. As the statement indicates, this strategy is part of a broad effort to counter antisemitism, Islamophobia, and related forms of bias and discrimination within the United States.

At the meeting, I was able to share the remarkable ways faith and interfaith employee business resource groups (EBRGs) at some of the nation’s largest companies are building corporate cultures where antisemitism and any form of religious hatred or prejudice have no place.

For example, American Airlines Abraham’s Tent initiative brings together members of their Christian, Jewish, and Muslim EBRGs to regularly discuss how their respective faiths approach different topics ranging from prayer to marriage to pressing social issues.

The meeting was hosted by Shelley Greenspan, White House Liaison to the American Jewish Community and a member of the National Security Council, and Melissa Rogers, executive director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

On February 28, American Airlines faith-based EBRGs will be hosting a day-long conference at the airline’s global headquarters in Dallas to share best practices and progress they’ve made on the journey to being recognized in 2022 as the most religiously inclusive workplace among U.S. Fortune 500 companies.

American Airlines also has invited the other companies among the Top 5 to share the progress they continue to make in this vital area of diversity. These include Intel, DELL, PayPal, and Texas Instruments.

Equinix and American Airlines executive sponsors of first annual Faith & Belief @ Work case competition at BYU Marriott School of Business

By Brian Grim

BYU MBA in partnership with the BYU Sorensen Center For Moral And Ethical Leadership are holding the first annual Faith & Belief @ Work case competition to inspire inclusion, compassion, and sharing across faiths and belief systems to build a better working world.

To my knowledge, this is the first such MBA case competition looking how to foster an inclusive workplace environment for people’s varying faiths and beliefs. It’s an honor for RFBF to be one of the sponsors.

The competition brings MBA students together from across the country to create a space where people of all beliefs can network while solving real business needs on the topic of faith/belief at work.

Paul Lambert, senior business fellow at RFBF, and I will be among the judges. The full judging panel includes representatives of the two executive sponsors, Equinix and American Airlines, as well as representatives from Accenture, PayPal, McKinsey & Company, and Fashionphile.

This case competiion reflects a growing movement among the world’s best companies to both create faith-freindly workplace environments as well as benchmark their progress in this area.

Related to that, if you missed it, a recording of the overview of this year’s REDI Index survey is now available. For those companies and organizations interested in benchmarking their progress in workplace religious inclusion, this 30-minute overview gets you started on the process.

For some employees, the ability to be open about their faith is an important component of “bringing their whole selves” to work

In an interview with ChannelPro Network’s managing editor Colleen Frye, she and I discussed the opportunities provided by including religion as part of DEI, such as overcoming prejudices and increasing employee engagement.

We also explored the dangers of excluding religion, such as missed opportunities to connect with customers. Taking this to heart, see how Google’s Inter Belief Network helps them connect “delightfully” with customers in the video below.

Google has taken steps to make their workplaces more faith-friendly through their Inter Belief Network (IBN) employee resource group. This allows them to better connect with their billions of users, the majority of whom are also people of faith. See an example of how this impacts one of their products.

Dr Abbas Panakkal joins as a Senior Advisor for Dare to Overcome.

Dr Abbas Panakkal is a member of the advisory board of the Religious Life and Belief Centre at the University of Surrey and the director of the International Interfaith Harmony Initiative, which has been organizing international interfaith conferences in collaboration with the United Nations Interfaith Initiatives, the Malaysian Prime Minister’s Department for Unity and Integration, and the International Islamic University Malaysia for a decade. Dr Panakkal was awarded a research fellowship in 2016 by Griffith University in Australia. His research is wide-ranging, focussing on the history of law, language, religion, interreligious integration, intercultural cooperation etc. He is also a fellow at the King Abdullah International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue in Lisbon, Portugal.

Dare to Overcome: Unity in Diversity

With India’s dynamic socio-economic rise on full display for the world during its G20 Presidency, Dare to Overcome’s next global gathering is in New Delhi October 17-19, 2023. The event’s theme is Unity in Diversity.

Dare to Overcome (DTO) is the premier global event for business leaders to share and celebrate best practices, virtues, and values in being allies of differing communities and cultures in workplaces and marketplaces, thereby building peace.

DTO’s signature events are the Global Business & Intercultural Peace Awards and the Business & Peace Symposium. American Airlines, the world’s largest carrier, is DTO’s official airline and partner.

It’s an honor to contribute to the Global Wellness Summit’s The Future of Wellness 2023, the highly anticipated annual global trends report relied upon by wellness leaders, investors and the media. To be released at a press event in New York City on January 31, this in-depth report is packed with insights on the key shifts impacting the business of wellness.

For almost 20 years, the Global Wellness Summit has been predicting many wellness trends that became billion-dollar sectors such as wellness real estate and femtech years before anyone else.

In my contribution, When Faith Makes Good Business, I look at how faith is emerging as a central issue to diversity and inclusion because it is not only good for business but also a contributing factor to health, purpose and resiliency.

Indeed, as companies continue to globalize – businesses that understand and adopt respect for employees’ faiths and beliefs are not only recognizing micro-level factors but also the macro factor that globally, religious populations are outgrowing nonreligious populations 23-to-1. To be fully competitive in today’s and tomorrow’s marketplaces, companies need to tap into the full identify, strength and potential of their employees by including religion (faith and belief, including non-theistic beliefs) as a full-fledged part of their DEI commitments.

Preorder the digital report by January 31 to save $20 and receive your copy the same day as leading media. View sample in-depth trends reports and learn more here.

By Brian Grim

India’s G20 presidency coincides with civil society push forward

The message is impossible to miss. Every airport, every thoroughfare, and even underpasses are covered with signs celebrating that India, “The Mother of Democracy,” is hosting this year’s G20.

With the theme, “One Earth – One Family – One Future,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi envisions India taking a/the lead in the 21st century. Or as one of the many the billboards puts it, “Big Responsibility, Bigger Ambitions: India’s G20 Presidency to accelerate new ideas & collective action.”

From what I’m seeing, these slogans are stimulating concrete actions by civil society. For example, I’m in India this week to prepare for the global edition of our annual Dare to Overcome event. Since 2014 we planned to move it to China after holding it in Brazil, Korea and Japan in tandem with the Paralympic Games, but, for both push and pull factors, we have shifted to India.

On the push side, China closed their doors for three years. On the pull side, India is indeed the world’s largest democracy, whether or not you agree with the argument that it’s the mother of democracy. Democratic market and political factors push doors open, unlike authoritarian governments that can close them by fiat.

While here, I have had the wonderful opportunity to participate in two initiatives demonstrating India’s push forward coming from civil society.

The first was a summit of some 75 mostly private university presidents and vice chancellors convened by the Maharashtra Institute of Technology (MIT) World Peace University in Pune.

Together with the president of Vermont University, Suresh V. Garimella, they launched a consortium with the aim of transforming higher education in India in partnership with American universities. The group gathered under the university’s “Peace Dome” to hear the Rev. Prof. Dr. Vishwanath D. Karad, the founder of MIT-WPU, share how the ultimate aim of the endeavor is peace through the unification of science and spirituality. While top government officials were involved, including the governor of Maharashtra, this is a civil society-led initiative.

The second was having the honor of participating and giving input during the advanced planning meeting for the first-ever National Legislators’ Conference, where leaders from each Indian State legislature will come together this June to discuss Leadership, Democracy, Governance and Peace-building in India and the world.

Again, while Prime Minister Modi is slated to open the conference, it is entirely civil society led initiative, also by MIT-WPU. More than 4,000 are expected to participate, including invited foreign observers.

While some may be skeptical that the weight of the 21st century will shift from China to India, I’m expecting it to be so, especially because the great achilles heel of China (the lack of a robust civil society sector) is one of India’s strengths. The powerful civil society of India was mightily on display in the events I participated in this week.

Of course, tomorrow being India’s 74th Republic Day, it’s a story in the making, so the ending requires all that civil society can muster to make it one characterized by “justice, freedom, equality and fraternity.”

This study examines the impact of religious and educational freedoms on prosperity. The system GMM model is applied by using the data of 45 lower-, middle-, and high-income countries from 2009 to 2018. The results show that religious and academic freedoms are positively and statistically significantly associated with prosperity.

It is revealed from the results that the lagged impact of both religious and education freedoms has a higher impact on prosperity than the current level of both variables. Interestingly, the interaction term between academic and religious freedom is also positive and statistically significant, indicating that their combined effect further increases prosperity. Further, the interaction term between government effectiveness and gross fixed capital formation is introduced. Its impact is positive and significant, indicating that capital investment positively affects prosperity in the case of higher government effectiveness.

This study uses gross fixed capital formation and trade openness as control variables and these variables have a positive impact on prosperity, but the impact of trade openness on prosperity is insignificant. Thus, this study recommends religious and education freedom to achieve prosperity, especially in low-income countries that are already lagging. More.

As organizations seek to keep workforces healthy and productive, an area needing more attention – spiritual health

A new initiative from McKinsey & Co. identifies spiritual health as one of four interconnected components of overall health.

The McKinsey Health Institute’s report last month, The secret to great health? Escaping the healthcare matrix, found that healthcare systems focus almost entirely on physical health, with more than 90% money spent on healthcare going toward treating physical disease or physical symptoms. However, most people consider that mental, social, and spiritual health are as important as physical health and that they are deeply interconnected.

Significantly, McKinsey goes beyond the World Health Organization’s definition of health, which includes physical, mental and social, but not spiritual* health.

In a recent survey of 19,000 people across 19 countries, McKinsey reports that more than 8-in-10 people said that their mental health was as important to them as their physical health. Likewise, the majority also said that spiritual and social health were “extremely” or “very important” to them. And this was not a function of the socio-economic position of a country. These views were shared across high-, middle-, and low-income countries.

Indeed, as organizations seek to keep workforces healthy and productive, an area needing more attention is spiritual health.

In our Corporate Religious Equity, Diversity & Inclusion (REDI) Index, we include whether companies specifically provide for employees’ spiritual health either through corporate chaplains or some other means. Among companies competing the survey in 2022, the majority did. However, these companies self-selected into the benchmarking program, so we do not know what many other companies are doing in this area. We suspect not a lot.

To see more about the McKinsey Health Institute, click here. To read the full report, click here.

Join Catholic University’s Busch School of Business, the Institute for Human Ecology, and the Center for Religious Liberty for a seminar examining the focus on diversity and equity in today’s corporate world, by EEOC Commissioner Andrea Lucas.

This in-depth discussion will consider the legal risks that may accompany corporate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, as well as shed light on common blind spots employers may have in this area.

Commissioner Lucas’s significant experience counseling employers combined with her work at the EEOC gives her unique insight into the practical and legal implications of the development and implementation of these programs, as well as the potential for DEI to conflict with an employer’s legal obligations under Title VII and other employment discrimination statutes.

See Commissioner Lucas’ keynote address at our year’s Faith@Work ERG Conference below, and read her transcript and watch the Q&A here.

By Brian Grim

On Friday, I had the honor of participating in the White House celebration of National Religious Freedom Day. It was the first time the celebration was combined with the naturalization of new US citizens at the White House.

The celebration coincided with the annual proclamation of Religious Freedom Day by President Joe Biden, who said, “Faith has sustained me throughout my life. For me and for so many others, it serves as a reminder of both our collective purpose and potential in the world. But for far too many people within our borders and beyond, practicing their faith still means facing fear and persecution. Today, let us recommit ourselves to ending this hate. And let us work together to ensure that people of all religions — and no religion — are treated with equal dignity and respect.”

On a personal note, Second Gentleman of the United States, Doug Emhoff, said, “Today is National Religious Freedom Day – and we know here in America that religious freedom is a core, transformative democratic principle and it sets our nation apart from the days of its very founding and continues now to forge our unique identities as Americans. I’m the descendant of people who came here a long time ago seeking freedom from religious persecution and today am the first Jewish spouse of an American President or Vice President and know first hand the powerful importance of religious freedom in our society.”

The event welcomed 13 new citizens from 13 different countries, some seeking greater religious freedom. These included teachers, aid workers, economists, soccer coaches, lawyers, moms, dads, many church going, temple attending or involved with their local mosque, now all US citizens.

US Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Ur M. Jaddou issued the oath of allegiance, mentioning how only in America could the daughter of a father from Iraq and a mother from Mexico rise to such a position.

Director Jaddou went on to present the annual “Outstanding Americans by Choice” award to Rev. Eugene Cho, President and CEO of Bread for the World, a Christian organization dedicated to ending hunger in the United States and the world. Rev. Cho emigrated from South Korea to the US with his family, who were originally from North Korea.

Melissa Rogers, Special Assistant to the President and Executive Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, delivered the keynote address. She shared about the various ways the administration is protecting religious freedom, including having established the Protecting Places of Worship Interagency Policy Committee last January, and implementing the largest-ever increase in funding for the physical security of non-profits — including churches, gurdwaras, mosques, synagogues, temples, and other houses of worship.

Melissa Rogers was previously senior counsel for the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.

Also in attendance were two US Ambassadors for International Religious Freedom, Democrat Rashad Hussain and Republican Sam Brownback. Amb. Hussain is the current ambassador in the Biden Administration and he is the first Muslim American to hold the post. Sam Brownback held the post under the Trump Administration and currently co-chairs the IRF Summit with Democrat Katrina Lantos Swett.

Others in attendance included Adam Nicholas Phillips, a senior leader in the Biden-Harris Administration on local, community and Faith-based engagement at USAID. Previously he was a pastor in Portland, Oregon.

New U.S. citizens wave American flags following taking the Oath of Allegiance to become U.S. citizens during a naturalization ceremony at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on Friday, with Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff on National Religious Freedom Day. pic.twitter.com/V6crX5RWCh

— Al Drago (@Al_Drago) January 13, 2023

I could feel the optimism, hope, and pride in the room as we welcomed 15 of our nation’s newest citizens.

To the new Americans I met today: your traditions, ideas, and beliefs will only make our nation stronger. pic.twitter.com/8A4Vyt2CDa

— Douglas Emhoff (@SecondGentleman) January 14, 2023