March 25th, 2003 - The Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences was awarded a $100,000 grant from the ChevronTexaco Foundation through the National Conference for Community and Justice (NCCJ) for Project L.I.G.H.T. (Learning Islamic Guidance for Human Tolerance). Project L.I.G.H.T. is one of 12 projects funded by a 1.5 million dollar September 11th Anti-Bias Project coordinated by the NCCJ and sponsored by ChevronTexaco Foundation.

Project L.I.G.H.T. is designed to empower members of the Muslim community to respond to prejudice expressed against many individuals and communities, especially South Asians, Muslims and Arab after the September 11th tragedy. The Project will train 40 Muslims from 10 mosques in Islam's fundamental messages of tolerance, inclusiveness and peaceful coexistence for all peoples, and also train them in skills in conflict resolution and identifying bigotry. Trained participants will go out in small groups to give presentations in metropolitan Washington DC community. As part of their training, participants will learn to give interactive presentations and to help the audience identify discriminatory situations they have seen and to help the audience come up with solutions to such situations. This technique will be used to train both Muslims and non-Muslims. This Project is unique in that it grew out of cooperation between graduate students at GSISS and faculty in designing an Islamic model for conflict resolution.

One year later after analyzing surveys and interviews with community members that participated in the project, Dr. Abdalla deemed Project L.I.G.H.T. successful.