At a time when division often dominates the headlines, stories of people building hope matter more than ever.
This year, as URI celebrates 26 years of building peace through interfaith cooperation, we are proud to celebrate another meaningful milestone: our Executive Director, Karen Volker, is featured on California Stories with Giselle Fernandez.
In this thoughtful conversation, Karen reflects on a lifetime dedicated to peacebuilding and shares why cooperation across differences remains one of the most powerful forces for creating lasting change.
As Karen explains,
"When people work together across faiths or across differences, they can tackle problems that they wouldn't otherwise be able to attack."
That belief has been at the heart of URI since its founding. What began as a bold vision has grown into a grassroots interfaith movement spanning more than 100 countries, where local Cooperation Circles unite people of different faiths, cultures, and traditions to dialogue, practice community-building initiatives, build bridges of understanding, and cultivate cultures of peace, justice, and healing in their communities.
Karen also offers a reminder that feels especially relevant in today's world:
"We don't have to go into a society and make wholesale change. It's one individual at a time."
Those words capture the essence of URI's journey over the past 26 years.
As we celebrate our 26th anniversary, Karen's feature is also a celebration of the thousands of URI Cooperation Circles, partners, volunteers, and peacebuilders who choose everyday to commit to practices that promote enduring, daily interfaith cooperation, ending religiously motivated violence and promoting cultures of peace, justice, and healing for the earth and all living beings.
We invite you to watch Karen's inspiring conversation and celebrate this milestone with us.