Founder
Joseph Friel
Joseph Friel is the founder of The Abrahamic Youth Initiative at Rose Castle and a student at the American School in London, where he leads the school's Rose Castle club. Through the club he has worked to bring the practice of reconciliation into everyday school life, creating a space where students of different faiths and convictions learn to disagree well and to see one another clearly.
The Initiative grew out of a simple conviction that has shaped Joseph's work from the beginning. The fractures of the Middle East, and the divisions between the Abrahamic faiths more broadly, are too often treated as permanent features of the world rather than wounds that people can choose to mend. Joseph believes the mending starts young. When Christian, Jewish and Muslim students sit at the same table before their views of one another have hardened, they build something that headlines and history cannot easily take from them.
That conviction led him to the Rose Castle Foundation, whose work in reconciliation and leadership formation has been recognised internationally, and to the idea of bringing students from the UK, the US and the Emirates together at the castle itself. The Initiative is his attempt to turn a passion for peace into something practical, a programme that forms real relationships across real divides and sends its participants home with projects of their own to carry the work forward.
I started this because I believe bridges can be built over even the deepest fractures, and that the people best placed to build them are the ones who will inherit them. My hope is that everyone who comes to Rose Castle leaves as a reconciler, not just for four days but for life.
Joseph Friel · Founder, The Abrahamic Youth Initiative at Rose Castle
To reach Joseph directly, write to joseph_friel@asl.org.