Know Your Neighbor: Multifaith Encounters

Know Your Neighbor: Multifaith Encounters (KYN-ME) is a national grassroots interfaith program that is the outgrowth of the Know Your Neighbor coalition of around 15 groups that was launched at the White House in December 2015 to work on policy concerning civil rights.

Founded on American values of religious freedom, pluralism, and inclusion, and motivated by a desire to build peaceful communities at the grassroots level through community engagement, the KYN-ME program was created by Islamic Networks Group (ING) in February 2016 to promote understanding and mutual respect among Americans of diverse religious and ethical traditions.

KYN-ME has grown into a collaborative effort of 100 partners with diverse missions and objectives who work together on social media campaigns that push back against bigotry and discrimination while promoting civil dialogue across differences, building relationships and peaceful communities, and advancing human rights and justice. These #KnowYourNeighbor social media campaigns have so far generated 13.2 million impressions with a reach of just under 7 million.

Past Campaigns

In 2017, KYN-ME started to launch online social media campaigns that focused on encouraging dialogue across differences, raising cultural awareness and understanding, and increasing mutual respect. Each campaign had a different theme:

• Summer Campaign (June 8th-August 30th, 2017) shared ways that adults, youth, and communities could get to know people of various backgrounds and ideologies through a variety of resources and tools created by our national partners.
• Share Your Story (July 20th-27th, 2017) presented simple yet impactful tools for dialogue and encouraged participants to share stories and information about themselves and their faith tradition that they wanted their neighbors and fellow Americans to know about.
• Back-to-School (September 7th-15th, 2017) shared best practices to help educators, students, and parents counter bullying and exclusion at school and encouraged individuals and organizations to share their success stories, concerns, and best practices and resources for countering bias and bigotry and creating more inclusive classrooms and schools.
• Aggregated Content for Educators and Communities (October 30th-November 6th, 2017) presented curated resources from both the Back-to-School and Share Your Story campaigns. The shared curricula and videos aimed to help educators supplement social studies content standards relating to religion and to help community leaders facilitate conversations among adherents of different religious and ethical traditions.
• New Year’s Resolutions (January 8th-15th, 2018) called participants to focus on one simple resolution: to get to know our neighbors and encourage mutual learning and understanding among diverse Americans. Individuals and organizations were invited to share on social media their plans to better their community this year.
• Be An Upstander (April 2nd-4th, 2018) encourage Americans to stand up for the neighbors of all ethnic, racial, religious and political identities. Individuals and organizations were invited to share on social media ways to be an upstander for their neighbors of all backgrounds and ideologies.

Impact

View our KYN-ME Impact Report to learn more about the success of this program and social media campaigns. Some highlights include:Our social media campaigns had a combined reach of over 6.5 million, with 13 million impressions.Donor analysis by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation found that our campaigns had an efficacy rate of 98%.92% of our partners participated in at least one social media campaign. Over 80% of participants believed that their participation in campaigns was beneficial to their organization.77% of organizations indicated interest in organizing local grassroots events.

Testimonials