The organization I founded, Interfaith America, is celebrating its 20th anniversary this fall. We’ve accomplished a lot in that time, including partnering with more than 600 colleges on interfaith programs, publishing eight books, and working with the Obama White House to launch the President’s Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge. As I look back, however, I wonder if any of it would have been possible in the current social environment.
The ethos of the early 2000s, particularly the emphasis on building strong institutions and expanding their impact, shaped my leadership. But I believe today’s nonprofit culture, with its unyielding focus on resistance and critique, would have made it nearly impossible to create the $13 million, 50-person institution I now lead.
That may sound counterintuitive. I am, after all, a leader of color, a minority in multiple ways, an Ismaili Muslim from India who immigrated to the United States as a toddler. On the surface, one would think that the current emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion would have paved my path. In truth, I think it would have curdled my potential.
Let me tell a story that illustrates my point.
After spending time in the late 1990s developing a model for interfaith youth social-action work, I networked my way into conversations with people at the Ford Foundation, the Chicago Community Trust, the MacArthur Foundation, and others who I hoped would support my fledging nonprofit. Program officers listened to my idea respectfully and then politely declined to invite a proposal. When I asked why, I was typically told that I didn’t have enough of a track record yet.
This frustrated me to no end. I had spent years running interfaith youth programs on multiple continents. I couldn’t be expected to continue doing this work on a graduate student’s stipend.
My undergraduate readings on critical race theory suddenly felt newly relevant. The language spewed easily from my mouth: The funding world was full of institutionalized racism, white supremacy, and colonialism. It was just straight white men, or their minority shills, giving money to other straight white men — or, again, their minority shills. Supporting a powerful young Muslim minority leader was simply a subversion too far.
I spoke this way to my mentors, former professors, and seasoned nonprofit leaders who had taken an interest in my work. Some had even taught me the ideas I was now repeating back to them. I thought they would be impressed by the sharpness of my analysis.
Not a chance. I cannot remember a single mentor giving that conversation oxygen. Under no circumstances were they going to allow me to join a conspiracy against my own agency. In fact, their message to me was virtually the opposite.
It went something like this: “So you’ve had five meetings with foundations and nothing’s happened? So have five more meetings. And while those get scheduled, take the advice people have been generous enough to give you, and lengthen your track record by running more programs. Get a reporter to cover one of your events, and send the article to the program officers you talked to six months ago. Improve your model. Prove your staying power.”
The advice was clear and consistent: Do not expect building an organization to be easy. Do not dare give yourself a reason for why someone or something else is preventing you from succeeding. The job of those seeking social change is to demonstrate not only that their solution works, but that they have the will and the skill to expand it on a wide scale.
As for the critical race theory that I read as an undergraduate, my mentors emphasized that it had its truths and its uses. But an interesting critique of the system is not meant to double as an operating paradigm for social-change leadership.
At first, I thought that I had an especially harsh and unforgiving group of mentors. But the broader social-movement literature I was reading in that turn of the century era matched their advice. Wendy Kopp’s One Day, All Children, Geoffrey Canada’s Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun, Robert Moses’s Radical Equations, Muhammad Yunus’s Banker to the Poor, and related texts all emphasized the same basic approach: Identify a problem, create a solution with a concrete program, build an institution that can scale up that program, measure its impact, and tell the story. Then do it again and again until you’ve created a virtuous circle that becomes embedded in the social fabric and creates lasting change.
Building Alternatives That Work
It was not lost on me that the great social-movement leaders of the era were largely women and people of color who succeeded because their respective solutions to social problems were superior and their organizations exceptional. Donors invested in leaders who defeated systems that were not working well by building alternative institutions that did.
My choices were obvious. I could either talk to myself — and possibly some of my college friends — about the impersonal forces preventing me from getting funded. Or I could improve my leadership, refine my program model, and continue to build my organization.
I chose the latter.
It took another year or so, and then in the summer of 2002, three foundations in quick succession — the Ford Foundation, the Chicago Community Trust, and the Woods Fund of Chicago — all made small project-oriented grants to my nonprofit. I doubt it was a coincidence that the program officers were all people of color — a South Asian American Muslim woman and two Black men. They were taking a risk on me and expected a strong return.
One of the men, the Rev. Kenneth B. Smith, a senior adviser to the Chicago Community Trust, said this to me as a he handed me a $45,000 check: “I went to bat for you, young man. Go build what you promised to build. Do not make a liar out of me in front of my colleagues.”
It was the same message my mentors had delivered: Expect the work to be hard, and accept the responsibility to succeed. The world desperately needs to be improved. Philanthropy is about investing in the people willing to put in the necessary effort to make the greatest impact.
Two decades later, I am now firmly in the established-leader category. I sit on important nonprofit boards and commissions, advise several foundations on their strategy, and am regularly asked to speak at events for young leaders.
These young people have some of the same frustrations that I did back when I was trying to get my organization off the ground. And they, too, cite white supremacy, institutionalized racism, patriarchy, and colonialism as reasons why their new ideas are not immediately accepted. Frankly, that’s understandable.
What surprises me is how frequently the established leaders who sit on the stage alongside me not only nod along but also amplify the message.
It has become routine for presidents of nonprofits, celebrated authors, and senior program officers at foundations to encourage emerging leaders to use their energies to call out white supremacy, decolonize institutions, and force people to recognize their oppression.
Assets and Aspirations
Had I received that advice 20 years ago, I would have eaten it up. It would have felt so gratifying to insist people recognize the wounds I carried from racism. But I’m not sure I would have had the energy left over to develop my strengths as a leader and to work on my weaknesses. I would have happily screamed myself hoarse telling everyone else what they were doing wrong at their institutions. But I would not have had the attention to create something better.
I was fortunate to have mentors who spoke to my assets and aspirations, who emphasized that social change is not about a more ferocious revolution but a more beautiful social order, and who insisted that being an architect of a more promising future is more important than being an arsonist against the current system.
Because however satisfying it is to engage in critical social analysis about all the impersonal forces preventing the world from changing, it is not half as satisfying as building an institution that is changing the world.
