Helena Miller-Fleig, a teacher of world religions, has been hosting ING presentations in her classroom for the past five years. She has also been a speaker in ING’s Interfaith Speakers Bureau, representing Christianity, for four years. She finds that both for her and for her students, ING is a natural choice: “When I came to ING, it was just the perfect marriage of values…this organization represents everything I hold dear.”

She sees first-hand how ING changes perceptions and attitudes:

“There’s still a lot of terrible stuff out there, a lot of prejudice and stereotypes. Yet after ING comes in, the students say, ‘This speaker changed my perspective.’…You can read about Islam, but when you meet someone, when you make that personal connection, all of those ideas of what you think you know, they just melt away.”

Helena’s observations are borne out by the surveys ING does before and after presentations. The research displayed in our 2012-2014 Impact Report shows that ING face-to-face presentations bring about dramatic changes in attitudes towards Muslims and Islam. 

These improved perceptions touch on many areas and stereotypes, from viewing Islam as inherently violent to the rights of Muslim women. In the past two years, after ING presentations to high school students:

• The percentage of those believing that Islam promotes terrorism fell by 89%.
• The percentage of those believing that Islam promotes the oppression of women fell by 75%.
• The percentage of those recognizing that Muslims have long been a part of the history of the U.S. rose by 74%.
• The percentage of those seeing American Muslims as “Americans like myself” rose by 40%.