Interfaith organization to start youth group

Trista Pinick

In June, the Bahai club at Washburn began to assemble an interfaith youth group.

Nov. 10, they’ll be having their first meeting to start organizing an event.

“We’ve had several meetings before, but they were just trying to get people to come and see who was interested in joining us (Bahai),” said Tihira Hamilton, president of the Bahai group on campus.

The interfaith youth group will be for highschoolers and college students of any faith.

Everyone is also open to attend Thursday’s meeting at the Grace Episcopal Church at 7 p.m. where the group will be deciding where and when they want to host their first activity. After that meeting, the group plans on getting together once a month to discuss and set up events.

“We’re thinking of doing something at the Y, which seems to be the consensus so far. There’s lots of different activities that the kids can do there. They can play volleyball, basketball, there’s swimming and all kinds of stuff,” said Chris Hamilton, faculty advisor of Bahai and political science professor. “We’re going to try to combine a fun activity with a get-to-know kind of thing, which is kind of intriguing.”

Hamilton said that there was some interest from the Mormons, several Catholic church and some other religious organizations to help the Bahai club develop an interfaith youth group.

“There’s one group that’s high school and middle school that doesn’t want to split up, but I don’t know how well it’ll work with middle schoolers and college students working on the same activities. There’s still a lot of discussion about everything,” said Tahira.

The interfaith group is also talking about doing some service work in the community.

“It’s a little bit harder to organize a service project (for interfaith) since it’s not directly with the specific youth group and church that people belong to. That’s why we’re going to start more fun activities and then talk about service,” said Tahira.

She also said this would be the first interfaith group in Topeka that was specifically targeted at the younger generation.

“It’s difficult trying to start something like this from scratch and it’s taken a little while, but now it finally seems to be coming along,” said Hamilton.