The Global Discovery Program (GDP)
Note:Children of Abraham has decided to suspend the Global Discovery Program while we focus on creating programs that will enable us to accommodate a much larger numbers of participants.
Please do not hesitate to contact us at this email address for further information.
The Global Discovery Program (GDP) is an intensive four-month online seminar that is designed to act as an educational gateway to bring together Muslim and Jewish youth from around the world.
These participants investigate a wide variety of topics and go through a journey of mutual discovery. They examine their current, as well as prospective relations, engage in thought-provoking discussions about their common Abrahamic roots, their social and cultural similarities and differences, the globalization of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and its effects on global Jewish-Muslim relations.
The 2007 program was the first program to debut our wiki platform. Online collaborative projects lead to unprecedented opportunities for mutual discovery. Wikis are software that made the Internet famous for intensely collaborative exchanges of thought and information as best exemplified through the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. It is through the Wiki that participants compare notes and work together in learning projects ranging from photo collages and collaborative research, to games that have students simulating a nation-building project.
The main goals of this program are:
- To incubate young Muslim and Jewish leaders in a virtual community that enables them to explore the frontiers of the Muslim-Jewish relationship.
- To bring young Muslims and Jews together to examine the bases of the past, present and future relationship between Islam and Judaism.
- To provide Muslims and Jews who do not have the opportunity to interact with each other a forum to do so and thereby gain some of the perspective that living in a pluralistic society brings.
- To model effective methods of interfaith dialogue so that participants can bring Children of Abraham's message to their own communities.
- To transmit the knowledge and confidence to take on leading roles in Muslim-Jewish dialogue.
- To encourage Muslim and Jewish youth to build empathetic relationships that will be the basis of a broader rapprochement between the two communities.