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Vision
Our vision is a just, peaceful world where everyone contributes to the betterment of society while feeling equally respected and valued, and where Muslim Americans play a vital role.
Mission
Our mission is to advance pluralism by educating, engaging, and empowering people and institutions to understand shared histories, bridge cultural and faith differences, confront interconnected forms of bias, and build inclusive, just communities.
Values
We work with utmost integrity.
Our ways and methods must enhance our reputation for integrity, honesty, and transparency among our donors, clients, volunteers, supporters, and the American people. We hold ourselves to the highest standards of character, even when it’s hard or inconvenient. We represent ourselves – our capabilities and limitations – truthfully. We give credit where credit is deserved.
We are partners and collaborators.
We are a team both within ING and within America. We are stronger together and we believe that increasing understanding, acceptance, and friendship across diverse faith-based, ethnic, and cultural communities will lead us towards a more peaceful, harmonious America for all. Within ING, we work together, without ego, putting aside personal preferences and predilections to further ING’s mission. When we disagree, we do so respectfully. Outside ING, we believe in the fundamental goodness, dignity, and equality of all humans – and our connection to all humans in our shared humanity.
We work to the highest standards of quality.
We do our work to the best of our ability, in ways that further our day-to-day mission and longer-term vision. Our work product is both scholarly, professional, and accessible. We value feedback, even when it challenges our assumptions and requires us to consider new ideas. When we err, we acknowledge our mistakes and make amends as required.
We work with heart… and with balance.
We are a small team whose work is, at times, difficult and time-consuming. We do our work because we embrace ING’s mission. We also recognize that we can’t effectively or sustainably do this work that we do if we’re feeling depleted. So, we will take time off from our work to tend to other aspects of our lives in ways that can facilitate our return to work feeling refreshed and replenished. When it feels difficult to find the down-time we need to maintain a healthy work-life balance, we will communicate our needs to a team-member and work to find appropriate solutions.
We work in service of others.
We serve our stakeholders, including our donors, clients, volunteers, supporters, and the American people. We work to serve, support, and build understanding and acceptance towards faith-based, ethnic, and cultural communities that are misunderstood. We serve to bring diverse communities together to build a more peaceful, harmonious America in which all of its people feel respected, valued, and welcome.
We believe in the value of pluralism, diversity, and inclusion.
We interact with all people based on the belief that they are good, decent human beings. We see value in diverse beliefs, ideals, and practices and we work towards increasing acceptance and understanding of these differences to better all of our lives through personal enrichment and collective strength. We subscribe to the principles expressed in the religion clauses of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution: our programs and services are therefore informative but also objective and non-proselytizing in nature.
Additional Information
ING Founding in 1993:
Intercultural Networks Group was founded in 1993 by Maha Elgenaidi, a Muslim American of Arab-Levantine-African origin. She had recently become better acquainted with her faith and was spiritually inspired to establish ING to teach Americans about Muslims and their faith because she deeply felt that, like her, all Americans had a right to know the truth about both the religion of Islam and the diverse peoples who practice it and who were misrepresented in the media throughout the first Persian Gulf War.
As an American, she was convinced that ING would reflect American values, serve Americans of all backgrounds, and promote mutual understanding among the diverse population of this country. She envisioned an educational component central to this work that would empower Muslim Americans to speak for themselves and their communities.
Using her corporate background in marketing and business management, Maha initially focused ING on interacting with the media to help provide a Muslim perspective that was generally missing from most local and national news. ING established relationships with managing editors and news directors throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and helped generate over fifty stories and news segments annually. The focus of these stories about Muslims for the first time centered not on foreign or international news but on local American Muslims in the context of family and community.
Around the same time, in the fall of 1993, ING initiated the Islamic Speakers Bureau program to enable a better understanding of Muslims and their faith in a proactive rather than reactive manner. Its purpose was and continues to be to supplement existing education about Islamic history and Muslim cultures as they are taught in middle and high school social studies classes. The program utilizes interactive presentations provided free of charge by live speakers to middle and high school classrooms. From the inception of the program, these presentations have been received enthusiastically by teachers and students alike, as they provide a human face and an authentic resource on a topic that was often unfamiliar, misrepresented, or confined to academic knowledge.
Requests for ING presentations in schools increased in subsequent years. At the same time other institutions expressed a similar need for education about Muslims. Beginning in 1995, ING began providing law enforcement agencies with cultural diversity trainings about Muslim American communities. In the following years, additional institutions such as corporations, health care providers, social workers, and faith and community-based networks and organizations also expressed their interest in this topic, especially after the tragic events of 9/11.
As ING expanded its work into various venues, it documented its model for replication across the country. Building on its years of experience in educational outreach, ING systematized its programs and strategies in a series of start-up kits that were authored by Maha, and in 1999 ING began providing training to interested groups in other cities and states. At one time, ING had over thirty active ING affiliates in the United States that provided educational outreach programs in their local areas.
Reflecting on the value of its work at the time, ING founder Maha Elgenaidi commented: “While there are numerous avenues one can take towards creating positive change in society, at ING we believe that self-representation, education, and engagement are some of the most effective means for promoting long term change, because, combined, they address the underlying beliefs that lead to bias and discrimination. Negative perceptions impact students’ bullying in schools, workers’ rights in corporations, every aspect of the legal justice system from the jury to judges, political access, quality of healthcare delivery, national security policies, and foreign policy, as well as our culture and ideals as Americans. By addressing people’s misperceptions about Muslims and Islam, for example, and how Muslim values are in fact resonant with American values, ING is not only preventing negative behavior from occurring, but also building positive relationships among all Americans while reinforcing America’s promise and its ideals of fairness and pluralism.”
ING Post 9/11:
Post 9/11, ING broadened its scope to include teaching about Muslims in the context of America’s religious and ethnic pluralism by creating several new programs for educators and community organizers who are interested in engaging on religious and cultural diversity. Those intercultural programs now include the following:
- The Interfaith Speakers Bureau, consisting of Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist and Christian speakers who present on panels together their perspectives on dozens of topics.
- The Intercultural Speakers Bureau, consisting of Muslim, Jewish, Black, Asian, Latino/Hispanic, and Indigenous Peoples speakers who present on panels together on topics relating to bigotry, its roots and manifestations, and ways to counter it together.
- Online tools, lesson plans and curriculum for education and community engagement.
- Theatrical programs that have included, among others, the Halaqa-Seder program that gives Muslim and Jewish Americans a fun and entertaining opportunity to engage, learn, and break bread together.
Today, ING reaches millions of people annually through events that are delivered in person, online, or on social media platforms. To learn more about ING’s work, see our ING Programs page. To learn more about the values that are baked into all our programs and organizational culture, see the About ING page.