By Rory Dulock | Staff Writer
Better Together, Baylor’s only interfaith organization, will host monthly community dinners called Neighbor Nights to bring together people in the Baylor community with different faiths, backgrounds and cultures.
Neighbor Nights are held through Better Together in partnership with a multicultural student organization. They feature the different traditions and stories shared by students over cultural cuisine.
Andre Baesa, senior coordinator of Intercultural Engagement and Student Life Initiatives, advises the student-led Better Together and helps with interfaith work on campus. According to Baesa, Neighbor Nights will be held once a month, and each month, they will partner with a multicultural student organization on campus.
“We really want to highlight faith, maybe what it looks like in different cultures,” Baesa said.
Hispanic Heritage Month will be celebrated on Sept. 16 in partnership with the Hispanic Student Association.
“We reach out to the organizations, and they set up a meeting [to] try to talk about [whether] there any foods that they’d love to highlight from their culture that maybe are tied to a specific faith tradition,” Baesa said.
The event typically lasts around an hour and a half. Baesa said many students come for the food, but he hopes that through the event they can highlight the different cultures represented.
“There’s a lot of collaboration involved, and we try to highlight both the culture of that student organization or just the organization in general, and then if there’s a faith aspect to these events,” Base said.
Los Angeles senior Karly Shepherd is a Civic Interfaith Leader responsible for interfaith activism and outreach within Better Together and across Baylor’s campus. Among the other leaders, she said they established a set of values and initiatives that center around building interfaith relationships and encouraging intercultural engagement.
“[Student organizations are] more than welcome to come to us and pitch an idea about how we could collaborate,” Shepherd said. “Sometimes we’ll have a panel of speakers from the community or leaders in the organization that give a more structured conversation about how culture and faith interact on Baylor’s campus.“
Shepherd said the event uniquely joins multi-faith perspectives.
“Better Together is exclusively responsible for creating a space for non-Christian students on this campus,” Shepherd said. “I think the partnership between a multicultural organization is unique in comparison to other events that happen.”
Baesa shared his hope for people to come together and find more similarities than differences in their views.
“What I love about [Neighbor Nights] is that it brings people together. I think it truly does bring people together of all backgrounds,” Baesa said. “That could be students who don’t orient around the Christian faith, but also students who do orient around the Christian faith and are just curious about other faith backgrounds to deepen their own understanding of different people so they can relate to them in multiple ways.”
