Building a Jewish interfaith youth leadership summit in Australia
Australia's young people are growing up in one of the most religiously plural societies on earth, and Jewish teenagers in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Perth navigate classrooms and sports clubs alongside peers from Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, and Christian backgrounds. The country has spent decades investing in multicultural policy through Harmony Day and the Australian Multicultural Council, yet few programs deliberately train Jewish young adults to step into the role of bridge-builders between faith communities. A Jewish interfaith youth leadership summit would fill that gap, equipping the next generation with the confidence, vocabulary, and relationships needed to lead collaborative projects and contribute to the civic life of the country they call home.
The Jewish community in Australia is unusually well-positioned to host such a gathering. Melbourne's Caulfield and St Kilda East precincts hold one of the largest concentrations of Jewish life in the southern hemisphere, while Sydney's Eastern Suburbs and North Shore corridors sustain a network of day schools, synagogues, and youth movements with deep expertise in informal education. Smaller but growing communities in Adelaide, Hobart, and the Gold Coast offer natural pilot sites where interfaith work can be tested at a human scale before being expanded to larger centres. Together, these communities bring institutional muscle, multilingual capacity, and a long tradition of advocating for minority rights in a multicultural democracy.
The proposal described here draws on the spirit of community-led idea competitions like The Next Big Jewish Idea, encouraging Jewish adults and young adults alike to co-design a summit that is genuinely co-owned with Muslim, Christian, and other faith partners. It treats the summit as a recurring national gathering, anchored in Australian realities and informed by successful cultural exchange models already underway elsewhere in the Jewish world.
The Australian context for Jewish interfaith initiatives
Interfaith dialogue in Australia has matured into a respected civic practice, anchored by organisations such as the Australian Interfaith Network and the state's multifaith forums that meet regularly in capital cities. Jewish representatives have long sat at these tables, advocating for the protection of religious schools, kosher infrastructure, and Holocaust education alongside partners from other minority faiths. The challenge is that much of this work is led by adults, with younger voices often invited to participate but rarely given the floor to design the agenda themselves.
A youth-led summit changes that balance by treating participants as decision-makers rather than beneficiaries. The format aligns with Australian best practice in peer-led learning, the same approach championed by organisations such as the Foundation for Young Australians, which has spent years demonstrating that young people thrive when given real responsibility. Embedding the summit in this tradition signals that Jewish young adults are central contributors to the wider multicultural project, not spectators of it.
The timing is right for another reason. Across Sydney and Melbourne, Jewish day schools have begun revising their civics curricula to include structured interfaith encounters, recognising that graduates will need to navigate religiously diverse workplaces and university campuses. A national summit gives those local initiatives a shared benchmark, where students from Moriah, Mt. Scopus, Bialik, and Emanuel can meet peers from Catholic, Anglican, Islamic, and Hindu schools on equal footing.
Designing the summit framework
The architecture of the summit should follow a three-tier model that moves from listening to action over a single long weekend. Tier one gathers young adults aged 16 to 22 for a residential program in a neutral venue, ideally a campus or retreat centre within easy reach of both Sydney and Melbourne. Participants are nominated by synagogues, churches, mosques, mandirs, and community organisations, with quotas to ensure balanced representation across faith traditions and across Australian states.
Tier two extends the gathering into a year-round virtual program, using monthly online sessions to continue conversations, share readings, and plan local projects. This extended timeline reflects the realities of distance in a country as vast as Australia, where a teenager in Perth cannot reasonably travel to a Sydney workshop every month. The virtual strand also allows the program to scale without ballooning costs, an important consideration for a community initiative rather than a commercial venture.
Tier three is the community action phase, where small teams design and deliver a local interfaith project in their home city. Teams receive seed funding, mentorship from established leaders, and a national showcase at the following year's summit. This structure borrows from action-learning programs run by the Australian Indigenous Leadership Centre, which has demonstrated that embedding learning in real community work produces deeper outcomes than passive workshops.
Program pillars and workshop themes
Content for the summit should be organised around four pillars: identity, dialogue, advocacy, and project design. The identity pillar invites participants to explore their own religious and cultural stories before engaging with others, an approach consistent with Australian school curricula that encourage personal reflection alongside intercultural understanding. Facilitators can draw on resources such as the Gandel Holocaust Studies Centre in Melbourne, which has extensive educational material adaptable for interfaith contexts.
The dialogue pillar focuses on skills rather than outcomes, training young adults in active listening, difficult conversation management, and the kind of restorative practice increasingly used in Australian schools to address conflict. Sessions can be co-led by Jewish, Muslim, and Christian facilitators working in pairs, modelling the very collaboration participants are being asked to practise. This structure is more honest than panels of distant experts because it puts relationships at the centre of the room.
The advocacy pillar introduces participants to the Australian policy landscape, including how religious communities interact with the Australian Human Rights Commission, state anti-discrimination laws, and federal multicultural programs. Young leaders leave with a working knowledge of how to write a submission, brief a local councillor, or partner with a member of parliament on a community issue. The project design pillar then translates that policy literacy into concrete planning tools, using design-thinking methods familiar to many Australian university students.
Partnering with schools, synagogues and local institutions
A summit of this ambition cannot rest on the Jewish community's shoulders alone. Effective delivery depends on genuine co-design with partner institutions, and Australian faith communities have shown they are willing collaborators when invited respectfully. Joint programming with the National Council of Churches, the Australian National Imams Council, and Hindu, Sikh, and Buddhist councils signals that the gathering belongs to the whole interfaith movement, not to one organisation.
Within the Jewish community, synagogues across the progressive, conservative, and orthodox spectrum can each play a role, from hosting opening prayers to sponsoring travel scholarships for regional participants. Jewish day schools in Sydney and Melbourne can release students and recognise summit participation as part of community service programs. Adult education bodies such as Limmud Oz and established Sydney community organisations have the convening power to bring parents and grandparents alongside their children, strengthening intergenerational support.
For inspiration, organisers can look to examples that have already proven the model works, including the work documented in the Jewish Cultural Exchange review, which outlines how partnering with local nonprofits across faith lines creates durable civic outcomes. That kind of structured partnership is exactly what an Australian summit needs to thrive beyond its pilot year.
Measuring impact and building sustainability
A summit without evaluation risks becoming a feel-good weekend with no lasting change. Measurement should begin before participants arrive, capturing baseline attitudes toward other faiths and confidence in interfaith leadership through short surveys adapted from validated Australian research instruments. Post-summit surveys, six-month follow-ups, and annual alumni check-ins then track whether the experience translated into ongoing behaviour.
Indicators of success might include the number of local projects launched by alumni, the diversity of faith traditions in each project team, and the rate at which alumni return as facilitators. Qualitative indicators matter too: friendships that cross faith lines, alumni who speak up against prejudice in their workplaces, and joint advocacy at council meetings. These narratives become the currency that attracts future sponsors.
Sustainability rests on three pillars: diversified funding, a permanent home institution, and a rotating host city model. Funding should draw on philanthropic foundations, state government multicultural grants, and modest participant contributions. A host institution such as a Jewish communal organisation, a multifaith council, or a university can hold the program between summits, providing governance and continuity. Rotating the host city between Sydney, Melbourne, and regional centres keeps the program connected to the breadth of the Australian Jewish community rather than concentrating attention in any one capital.
| Summit element | Centralised national model | Rotating regional model |
|---|---|---|
| Host city | Always Sydney or Melbourne | Alternates across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide |
| Travel costs | Lower for east-coast participants | Higher overall, but distributed more fairly |
| Community ownership | Concentrated in major centres | Broadens engagement in smaller Jewish communities |
| Local relevance | Risks feeling generic | Each iteration reflects the host city's interfaith landscape |
| Volunteer pipeline | Easier to sustain in established hubs | Builds leadership capacity in growing communities |
A pilot held in 2026 in Melbourne could partner with the Gandel Holocaust Studies Centre and the city's vibrant multifaith network to test the model, while a 2027 Sydney edition would leverage the density of Jewish infrastructure on the eastern seaboard. Subsequent gatherings could rotate toward Perth and Brisbane as those communities grow their interfaith ambitions.
Recommendations for moving from idea to action
- Convene a small steering committee of Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and secular educators from Sydney, Melbourne, and a regional centre to co-author a one-page summit concept before any public announcement.
- Secure early partnership letters from at least two Jewish schools, one Islamic college, and one multifaith organisation to demonstrate credible demand before approaching funders.
- Apply for seed funding through Australian philanthropic bodies with a track record in interfaith work, paired with modest institutional fees to share ownership of the budget.
- Design the evaluation framework during planning rather than after the pilot, working with an Australian university research team to ensure the data is publishable.
- Plan the second summit before the first opens, so alumni leave with a clear invitation to continue their journey rather than a vague promise of future contact.
Across Australia's Jewish communities, there is a quiet readiness for this kind of project. Young adults are asking for spaces where their Jewish identity and their commitment to a multicultural country can sit comfortably together, where they can practise the difficult conversations their grandparents navigated in different circumstances, and where they can build friendships that survive outside the summit walls. An interfaith youth leadership summit offers exactly that, anchored in Australian realities, drawn from international best practice, and ready to be shaped by the community members it intends to serve.
If this idea resonates with you, add your voice to the conversation on The Next Big Jewish Idea platform and help turn a shared vision into a gathering that the next generation of Australian Jewish leaders will remember for the rest of their lives.