JOIN
You may explore the two options below:
- Join an existing Cooperation Circle (CC)
Review the existing CCs in your area and get in touch with the CC that fits your personal interests.
- Create your own CC. Details below
Creating a URI Cooperation Circle
United Religions Initiative Middle East & North Africa (URI MENA) welcomes your interest. If your group or organization wishes to join URI MENA (to become a URI Cooperation Circle), please read and reflect upon the URI Vision and Mission Statements, URI’s Preamble, Purpose and Principles, and the Rights and Responsibilities of URI Members (attached below).
What is a URI Cooperation Circle (CC)?
URI members are called Cooperation Circles (CCs), which are self-organizing groups of at least seven members from at least three religions, spiritual expressions, or indigenous traditions—including atheists and agnostics. CCs work on two levels: by giving people of different backgrounds a chance to work together, and by tackling important community issues their members care about, including poverty, social and economic inclusion, human rights, education, intercultural understanding, peace building, religiously motivated violence, environment protections, etc.
CCs are created by people who share a common vision: that our religious and spiritual lives, rather than divide us, can guide us to build community and respect for one another. URI welcomes already-established groups to join as CCs to connect to this global movement. By joining the United Religions Initiative (URI), you will be part of the world’s largest grassroots interfaith peacebuilding network, with over 900 affiliate members operating in over 102 countries. URI brings together people of different faiths and cultures to promote enduring, daily interfaith cooperation, to end religiously motivated violence and to create cultures of peace, justice and healing. To learn more about URI Global, please visit (www. uri.org)
The Process of Joining URI
We are very excited that you are considering embarking on the process to become a member of URI’s global family. Below is an in-depth description of this process as well as some helpful resources about different steps along the way.
Get Acquainted
Learn what it means to be a URI member by reading about Cooperation Circles, URI’s Preamble, Purpose and Principles (URI PPPs) and the Rights and Responsibilities of members (CC Application and Information attached below). To get more of a flavor for the URI global family, you can also watch the “We Unite” video, read about our organizational design and view our annual reviews (all are available on www.uri.org). You may also visit our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/mena.uri/
Share
Consensus-building is one of the core values of URI and is reflected in our application process, in which we encourage the entire group to be a part of the decision to apply to become a member of URI.
Apply
To apply, your group must read the Rights and Responsibilities of members, meet the requirement of having at least seven members of at least three different religions, spiritual expressions or indigenous traditions, and fill out the CC application form (application and information attached below. Please ask us to provide you with this document in Word format), and send it to the URI Regional Coordinator for MENA at [email protected]
Appreciative Inquiry
Soon after you submit your application, the URI Regional Coordinator, or a staff member or a volunteer, will contact you to conduct an Appreciative Interview, which is more like a conversation. It is designed for you to become more familiar with URI and for us to become more familiar with your group. Ideally, this interview will take place with as many of your group members as possible.
Become a CC
Following the interview, the interviewer will share a rough transcript of the interview with the Cooperation Circle Approval Committee, a subset of URI’s elected Global Council. This committee meets once a month to review and vote on applications. Upon approval, you will receive a welcome email, followed by a welcome packet.
