The Council of Christians and Jews (CCJ) is the oldest interfaith Charity in the UK. CCJ’s Campus Leadership Programme equips university students to run Interfaith events on their campuses.

The Campus Leadership Programme is open to students from any U.K. based university, from all faiths and backgrounds. We currently have students from the following universities: Edinburgh, Leeds, Oxford, Bristol, Cambridge, Birmingham, and Durham.

University life provides an amazing opportunity for students to engage with others from different backgrounds and beliefs. We have anecdotes from students who were interested in running or being part of interfaith work, however, lacked experience, confidence and knowledge about how to do this well. CCJ’s work on campus helps facilitate this and gets students involved in interfaith work in many ways.

CCJ’s engagement on campus is important as we have seen that incidences of hate crime on campus, in particular antisemitism and Islamophobia, as well as anti-Christianity more anecdotally, have increased. The CST report 2020-2022 shows a 22% increase in university-related antisemitic hate incidents reported to CST over the past two academic years. https://cst.org.uk/news/blog/2023/01/19/cst-report-shows-22-increase-in-campus-antisemitism
 
Through the campus leadership programme, our training residential, online sessions and engagement with faith societies on their own campuses, students build friendships and understanding with others from different faith backgrounds. Through this, we contribute towards building more cohesive campus environments where students of faith feel comfortable to share about their faith and respectfully learn about other people’s faiths and beliefs.