“When I go to a campus where the Muslim Student Association and the Hillel are not talking to each other,” he said (referring to the national Jewish student group) this spring in a lecture at Columbia University, “my question to them is, ‘Who did you feed in Ramallah by not talking to Hillel? Who did you keep safe in the south of Israel by not talking to the M.S.A.?’ ”

There are many interfaith groups, but none like Mr. Patel’s, where youthful idealism and spiritual searching have been channeled by pro bono consultants from McKinsey & Company into strategic plans, templates and spreadsheets. The offices take up a whole floor in a handsomely renovated industrial building. On one end is a small prayer room. On the other is a bulletin board where the manager of foundation development tracks grant applications worth millions of dollars.

At a staff meeting, which started and ended on time, two senior leaders in T-shirts emblazoned “Better Together” walked everybody through a PowerPoint presentation of the group’s recent expansion.

By the end of the school year in June 2010, the Youth Core had trained 18 “interfaith fellows” who each recruited about 40 students on their campuses. By this June, the Youth Core had trained leaders on 97 campuses, who engaged an average of 100 students, for a total of 10,000 participants — more than 10 times over the previous year. The leaders are undergraduates, religious and nonreligious, who attended summer training sessions led by Youth Core staff members, and then returned to their campuses to organize interfaith events and community service projects using the upbeat slogan, “Better Together.”

The meeting ended when the vice president for strategy and operations, Gabe Hakim, a former McKinsey analyst who wears a “What Would Jesus Do” bracelet, recited his signature send-off: “Let’s go make it a norm.”

Mr. Patel responded with his signature meeting closer, “Rock on.”

Mr. Patel started the Youth Core in 2002 with a Jewish friend, a $35,000 grant from the Ford Foundation and one full-time paid staff member, April Mendez, an evangelical Christian who still works with the organization as vice president for leadership.

Mr. Patel’s parents were Indian immigrants from the Ismaili Shiite sect (led by the imam Aga Khan IV), which is known for its philanthropic work. But Mr. Patel spent his days at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and afterward running away from his own roots, searching for spiritual identity and purpose.