Bismillahirrahmanirrahim The whole idea of this series of trainings by these three orgs is that we really want to be able to start building some civic engagement and some organizing power within our communities. We know that we're not in a kind of time vacuum. This is 2019, we have a big election coming up 2020, something like that. And that we don't want to be in a situation like it was in 2016 at the national level or even after 2004, 2008 or right after 2001 as well. We want to be in a situation where we have the tools and we have the kind of understanding of how we effectively engage at the national level. But more so from my end and Empower's end is how do we continue to do our work and build power and continue to organize in off years outside of like national elections. So with that, thank you for coming through and I think we will get started. So just by a show of hands, who here is familiar with Empower Change? Okay, cool. We have a handful of folks, one of them being a plant in the crowd to my wife. But so for folks who don't know Empower Change is a digitally native grassroots Muslim organization. That's kind of jargony, but digitally native basically means that we do a lot of online organizing, very similar to Move On, United We Dream, Color of Change. Where what we do is that we understand that based on our limited resources, how is it that we can maximize our outreach? And we realize that the digital space is a place that we can really engage a lot of individuals across political geographies to be involved in issues that we think are important and that also people tell us are important. So in that vein, we do a lot of digital advocacy. We'll be doing petitions, driving phone calls and coordinating distributed mobilizations around issues that are important to us. But myself, I came on board in about a year and a half ago to build out the fields team. So going, rewinding a little bit more Empower Change had started at the end of 2015 with three founders, one of which was from the Bay Area. So our executive director Linda Sarsour is one of the co-founders of this organization. Dustin Cron who is from Berkeley from the Bay Area was the other co-founder and then Mark Crane who is actually a Muslim organizer at Move On. So the three of them had envisioned, you know, what's the like a way that we can capture and engage Muslims nationally. And they imagined that this digital platform is the way to go. So last year around the, so no, not last year, in 2017, Empower had been building up a bit of their digital advocacy work. And so we have been on front on issues around labor practices with Amazon health care rights and support around a dream and DACA. After the 2016 election, and this is kind of segging into how I got involved, my wife and I, we were in Los Angeles. On the night of the elections, what night was that November 7th, 2016, we were in downtown LA in my office watching the kind of results. And we're, you know, we're three hours behind the East Coast. We started seeing results coming in. And at that night, Mayor Garcetti, the mayor of LA was having a huge watch party at one of the spaces in downtown LA. We left my office to go down there. And we started seeing gradually the mood of the city. LA is pretty liberal in downtown LA. People were just kind of like, literally in a drunken stupor like, oh my God, we just lost that country. And so it was kind of interesting to see that.  I had a bad feeling about this election. I think this is going to be making make it a bit more difficult for people of color within this country. So that was the prelude to a November 2016. During those months between November through March, April 2017, my wife and I were approached by several Muslims that were active in LA in, you know, coming to a rally, signing a petition, maybe going to City Hall. And they asked us and a few others, what is it that we heard you're an activist? What's the work that we can do to be more engaged beyond just going to a rally and just driving phone calls? So I, you know, was thinking, oh, I really, I'm not sure what we should do. I have a group of Muslim leaders that's saying that they want to do some work. What do we do? So I did the, I just checked my network and I know a Muslim community organizer at a group called LA Voice. So she had been doing grassroots work and and like really kind of getting into the local issues of what was happening in LA. So we were doing work around prison reform, affordable housing and better funding for public education. She told me, Ishrak, you should just treat this like an organizing, like listening session and just start developing leaders. And I was like, oh, that's a great idea. So we started a small group called Muslim Band Together. And literally this was like a second full-time job for me outside of my regular job. We were just, you know, having phone calls and conferences with the other organizers. What's the kind of trajectory and the ladder of engagement that we want to like instill on this group of 20 to 25 individuals that came that asked us like organically, what do we do?  Linda and I had worked together on some immigration campaigns and some electoral campaigns. She was saying that, hey, we might actually have an opportunity for you to come down to Empower. Empower being a digital organization.  But my heart was doing relational work and kind of getting people to dig into local issues. And so she was like, you know, we have an opportunity to take our online base and bring them into offline work. Do you want to be a part of that? Do you want to start training individuals? And I'm like, no brainer. I think that would make sense given that I could stay in LA and not have to move to New York. But the trick was that I have to be traveling places to do these trainings. So that's how I came to Empower Change. And a little bit more about my background and my kind of credentials for organizing. I started out, I was a teenager in New York when 9-11 happened. The first thing that I saw in my community was that there was deportations happening, particularly in the Bangladeshi community in Long Island.  For some reason as like a 16, 17-year-old, that didn't sit well with me. I read Malcolm X at that time and I'm like, okay, what's the work that needs, like, how do we kind of express our Muslim identity and continue to build power? These are the ideas that I was thinking about as a teenager. And then fast-forwarding into college. I really, like Sister Zarina mentioned, agenda to change our condition and the importance of, you know, as a Muslim responsibility for us to be involved in being active change makers in our communities. I got that kind of understanding through Mass. Muslim American Society really taught me that, you know, in order for me to be a good Muslim, I also have to improve the communities around me. And so fast-forwarding six years in Boston, I got really involved in local campaigns around security guard worker rights, capping interest rates on banks that were being predatory in low-income communities. And this is kind of what laid the foundation for me, saying that, oh, you know what, organizing is not just photo ops, but it's about getting into the issues that are impacting the community. No matter how gray and boring it may look on paper, these are things that are impacting large scales of people. And so that's kind of what brought me into organizing, and therefore I started training as an organizer. I moved to Chicago. I organized there for about a year. And then I went back to New York where I grew up and organized there for several years, doing electoral work, affordable housing work. And we did a lot of work around foreclosures and affordable housing work within Queens and Long Island. And then, you know, jumping to LA, I needed a break from the gritty New York work, and I ended up in Los Angeles and got pulled back into the work, Alhamdulillah, right after the elections. So I will stop there on who we are at Empower Change and what I'm about. And I would love to just do like a quick go-around of individuals to say your name, where you're from in terms of what geography you're from here, and then just a quick line of what actually made you interested to come to this training. And we'll actually start on my right. Got it. Got it. Got it. And then vet out Empower to see if we're... My name is Brandon Remson, and I'm a new Muslim here at the Community Center, native of the Bay Area, currently residing in Hayward. I'm a board member with the Interfaith Council of Alameda County, and social justice issues have always been very important to me and my community and my family. And I just saw this as an opportunity to build my skills, and that's about it. My name is Irina Sololu. I'm a social activist already. I've been doing this for the past three years. How's Yusuf and Zehshakar's book... Yeah, the agenda to change our condition. And that was just a transformation from three, four years ago. I'm a housing commissioner for City of Pleasanton. So my passion when I was here as a board member a few years ago was affordable housing and what's happening to the poor communities and people getting homeless and gentrification of the neighborhood. We got more involved with that, and I see that as an issue that we have a crisis in this state with lack of affordable housing and people being displaced and moving into being homeless. So if we as Muslims want to make a change, we have to start working on the local issues. We cannot just come back and talk about Islamophobia. We cannot just talk about legal cause. We cannot talk about anything unless we are involved and including other people in the community which are making alliances with the Jews making alliances with the Christians. So that's where I have been. Actually, I got a lot of my training from the genesis of Oakland because they're the ones who are activists and they know how to do this. They've been organizing for many generations. So I had to learn from the experts. So Alhamdulillah, I learned quite a bit, but still moving the Muslim community is very difficult. And I wish and I would want to see more Muslims involved because that's what we are here for. I believe we are here for a reason to make the lives of others better. And how are we going to do it if we're just sitting at home? Sounds like everyone. My name is Sarah. I'm Ishaq's wife. I also do advocacy at a different organization. My organization is not faith-based and only work or specifically work with Muslims. But I have similar approach to organizing and it's really exciting to see, you know, that advocacy and activism growing in our community. But definitely agree with Sister Zarina. There's so much more to go. So really grateful for all of you guys taking time out of your Saturday morning to be here. So my name is We Am and we live in Berkeley. I guess recently I've been like more aware about race and like othering in our society. Even in the Bay Area, we're not immune. So I guess I'm here today to just learn more about what we can do to empower each other and our societies. Assalamu alaikum. I'm Rashid. So I live with Karen Berkeley. Very early in my social civic activism phase of my life. But I do definitely want to get involved more. I think probably just being in Berkeley has kind of instilled that desire in me. I do think that we are at a critical time in our country, in a world where we can have a lot of impact. And it's important for me to form a sense of community wherever I go. And it's important to, you know, put our faith into action. And I'm just generally interested in learning more about how we can do that. I'm also a long-listed American and I have family. Like I come from the East Coast. I know some of them that are on Long Island. Oh wow, we probably do know some of them. And also something similar. How far is Berkeley from here? It takes about like 40 minutes. So I appreciate you all coming out. My colleague who's arguably the MVP of the organizing, Kiffa Shao also got her bones in Berkeley and her taste in activism there too. Maybe we'll just have yourself and then Adnan also. Hello everyone. My name is Faran. Also went to school with Kiffa. So I've got my organizing bones there. Well, I think both of us probably got it a bit earlier than that with their seeds. Yeah, so I am actually a board member for Polygon who's putting on the training next week on legislative advocacy. Our president is going to be flying in from DC. They have that training. I have always, I guess, been involved peripherally in some sense while there are Berkeley. I also worked for the city of San Francisco for a while. So was on the inside actually working on a lot of different consulting projects for the city, including working with the police department during a time when there was a lot of really bad stuff that the police was getting covered for nationally. So it was interesting thinking about how one can make change from inside so to speak. I also went to graduate school for public policy and have always kind of had this on my mind. I worked on the midterm elections in Arizona this past cycle, which ended up being one of the closest races in the country. So it really was, I think that opportunity for me to say, hey, let's, I know that if I need want to help organize the Muslim community, I need to, as many people said, I need to help organize from outside of my community and then also see how I can bring those skills back and help us. I'm Adnan. I've been involved in voluntary activities throughout my life. I've been an active member of Greenpeace earlier in my undergrad and others, but I've never been involved in civic engagement or anything to do with politics or growing up. It was considered bad. It was so I've been extremely passive throughout doing everything you can, but stay away from politics, stay away from civics. It's not for you. So I joined, I met Salal Bakri in Belmont eight years ago. He'd been pushing me, nudging me. And finally, I think he got hold of me yesterday. He called me. He's like, Adnan, there's one happening in present and just beside you. I couldn't switch my schedule much, but I was able to come in and I just want to learn and how to get into this and how to learn the process of getting involved. Now it would be remiss Hassan has been the MVP. He's been the one that's setting up the room and making sure that everything is going on. So if you wanted to just say a quick word of what brought you here, why are you up in the mornings? Assalamu alaikum, brother. My name is Hassan. I work for the Money Brother. I'm his assistant. I'm the coordinator for the Masjid MCC. I'm always pleased to have coordinated a lot of events in Masjid. And I'm very pleased that you all have attended the programs. And I'm also looking forward to that. I've been involved in politics in college. Congressman in Belmont for about 12 years. I was helping him in sort of like translations and all this other stuff. I have been involved in. And inshallah, this would be definitely a good program that people are attending here with definitely benefits inshallah. I'm looking forward to that. So just that as he's been doing khidmah for us, let's make sure we do khidmah for the Jami as well. Let's just clean up our materials as well when we take breaks. So great. I appreciate everybody sharing a little bit. I think that just kind of helps me warm up and understand where folks are at. And we get to know each other a little bit. So let's jump in. So why community organizing? Why we do, why empower it kind of approaches this with a certain model? For us, we understand that community. I should run back. Cool. So with us, community organizing is one kind of tool in your toolbox of doing advocacy work or just being active in public life. We believe that, you know, this is not the kind of cure all thing to like resolve all issues. We do believe that there's a lot of lessons to be learned within community organizing, particularly around the second point of being relational and leveraging relational power. And with that, I think is if there's one thing that we could come away with from this training is that, you know, we have to like make an effort to be a bit more relational before we go public and go political. And then lastly for us, what makes empower change ultimately different or, you know, distinguishes us from different organizing groups. I'm not the only Muslim organizer in this field nationally, of course. And we're like, we are not necessarily unique from other faith communities of drawing from our own faith principles of why we organize. But we realize that, you know, in this kind of diasporic context for a lot of the Muslim, several of the Muslim organizers that I work with that are from an immigrant base, we realize, you know, we're drawing from Christian and Jewish values that actually put us into professional organizing. But what do we have within our own kind of wealth and our own literature and our own kind of history that connects us to why we should be relational, why we should build power. And I'm hoping that we can cover a bit of that today. So quickly with some ground rules, this is a small group, but this is just a few things that I'd love folks to be mindful of. So being present, can somebody, let's just do this popcorn style. I'm not one for like hands and all that. But when I say be present, what does that actually mean? Sure. And if you've got to be on the phone, just take it out.  But if you've got to do that, just be mindful of the space and respect each other's time here. Asking questions. Yeah, exactly. But I love this to be interactive. That's like, it's a little uncomfortable for me to be behind a table. I like being in front of with folks. So just the more you interact with me, the more I think I'll be able to engage y'all in the material as well. And then speaking from a place of eye and sharing your experience and not being theoretical. What is that? Cool. Thank you. Respecting difference of opinions. Yeah. And that's something that I may also get caught up on. So I will look to my wife. Actually, she'll ground me to make sure that I don't do that. And then the next one is being patient with the facilitator. That's just for my own sanity. I've done this material a few times, but I just want to be sure that folks know that all the trainers, and I speak on the other trainers that we've trained with, that everyone's human and has a spectrum of expertise and all that. So being mindful of that. And feel free to also let me know that, hey, this does not actually logically make sense what you've described. And then last thing is land the plane. What does that mean? Yeah. So this is something, I got to give credit to the Chicago organizers. They're like, you know, when you're in public space, make your point. You can be elaborate. Tell a story and all that, but be mindful of the space that you're taking from others and the space that you're creating. But drive home your point. And so the idea is landing the plane. I may do this, but also as a facilitator, I might just make some cues to say that, hey, like, let's wrap and move to the next point. Is there anything else from these ground rules or anything missing from these ground rules that folks would like to add? Exactly. That's a beautiful suggestion. Would you like to do that collectively as a group or something? Yeah. Okay. So now at the piece that I want to go through is be folks spoke a bit about their experience and curiosity around activism and all that. I'd love to know what do these words mean to y'all and people can just shout out a word and tell me what they think. I'm going to try and capture this. If you want to capture. So I just want to get a clearer sense. What do these words mean to folks or when they think of these words, give me like a quick definition of them. Yep. You could pick any word and then we'll go with that. I just want to capture some ideas what folks were thinking. Yeah. So community for me it's a sense of belonging. Penalities. Community for me means the space we live in and the people we live in with. So that includes different faith. So people around me, so my neighbors can be Muslim. Another sense of community is people have faith. And another sense of community is from where you come from. So for example, I'm from Pakistan. So I will be more sometimes from the same faith. So is there, it sounds, let's go to another term. Let's go to relational. What does relational mean to folks? Relation means having a connection with others so that when you need that person to be behind you, you will have their backing. So it's a good relationship. For example, I think of relational is if I'm working with the church community and if I need them to come in, I should have enough understanding and a good relationship enough that if there's an issue dealing with the psalmophobia or something that I can count on them, that they will, you know, they have my back and they'll come to the event that I asked them to come. And I think building relations and power means you have them or being the Muslim actually, we should be back each other. So if there's something going on, I should be able to back everybody out and that's having a good relation. We have to be close enough. Anybody else on relational? I'd say the ability to connect and meet people where they're at. I know there's like a famous quote that's like something like the strength of our independence is dependent upon our interdependence. So. Interdependence. Cool. Maybe we'll just go down the line. How about power? Numbers. Numbers. Numbers. Numbers. Numbers. Numbers. Numbers. Numbers. That's the power is giving it the human power. Power to me is often misunderstood and highly sought after for the wrong reasons. Misunderstood. Maybe we'll take one more in power. Influencing. Influencing is a good problem. The next term, community organizing. This might be a little on the nose, but I'm just curious. How would you describe, what would organized look like? Organized. I mean that if the community is together and they have some purpose and then with that they go forward, they will have a strength. Otherwise the community can be scattered and you have nothing going. Self-interest. In order to work on some of this stuff unfortunately, you have to have a self-interest. It has to keep you going. If you don't have a self-interest and having a goal on site, you're going to lose sight of what you're trying to do. So it has to hit home and has to be personal at that level. It has to affect you in a way in order to have an interest. And you keep it going. Others. Self-interest is a very important concept for us. Also, you should be watching yourself whether it's only for your personal goals, making money or fame or all that. So you have to really understand what is meaning behind it. Self-interest should have an interest of the community. It's only your own self-interest. Sometimes you can be more hurtful to the cause. Yeah. I think self-interest often has that negative foundation. But politics is like the science of balancing self-interest. Yeah. Or competing interests. So campaigns. Rehana, I know you have some familiarity with it. What is a campaign? Yeah, maybe campaigns could be trying to figure out how to award it more broadly. But it could be a movement that has a common purpose and a particular philosophy that's driving everybody towards something. Sure. I'm going to say something with a direct outcome in mind. Yeah. Brandon, are you going to say something? Words that come in mind with campaign. If you want to be specific and leave the broad is canvassing, phone calling, mobilizing, self-giving campaign for an issue or an individual. I would just say that campaigning is a way to a function of organizing in a way that affects community. Yeah. Sure. Often it's helpful to have a target. Whether that's a person or an organization or some symbol. Cool. Mobilization. Let's do mobilization and activism together. So that way I'm going to review some of the hard textbook definitions. I think there's been some overlap. Someone you had mentioned. Getting people to actually do what they have to do at the end of the day to achieve. Yeah. Given that there is a community, given that there is a structure, given that there is a way to communicate and that relationships have been built and slowly you have a voice that will allow you to have power after you have finished community organizing. So now I added all the words. To me, mobilization is inspiring other people to be on board with the cause that's mutually beneficial. Yeah. And lastly, we'll just take activism. Somebody give me a, I hear using good and bad connotation. I think activism to me is overly used, but not. So what is not being carried through when you're saying? I think today I hear that people saying like, are you an activist or I am an activist as if it's like this label that I think often is misunderstood even by myself. Like what does it mean to be an activist? And like why does one person deserve the title over another based on like their beliefs? It's to me like more action oriented than beliefs. And I think that we're kind of like blurring the waters between those two. Sure. There's a relationship with them. So I'm going to, yeah, go ahead. So I had one comment. No, go ahead. Activism at the essence is beliefs turned into action and this yearning desire to change inside you. I've changed your condition or the issues you believe in as a reflection if you may allow me. In 30 years Islam spread much more than was able to be accomplished by Christianity or at least Rome and Catholic Christianity in 500 years just in 30 years much more almost triple the size of how vast and I attribute to that to the capacity of the prophet Muhammad instituting change fundamental change in people and transformation on a certain level where he took people who were not activists and changing into 100,000 activists 80,000 of them died outside their home country making change which is basically their biggest calling was actually social justice based in economic justice and with underlying environmental justice so in reality whenever I think of activism I think of this religion actually, yeah and it was supposed to be as opposed to where we at right now almost zero activism because we have not gone through a process of transformation. We'll actually touch upon some of those prophetic examples Brother, I just realized we haven't even introduced if you could just say your name and where you're coming from Well, I was just here for the issue prayer last night and I had a prayer as the announced about this program today here and so I I can't say the whole time but I said I'm just going to join in to see it's all about and we just had one more of it come in and then we'll actually give some of these What am I saying? Your name, where you're coming from and what brought you here? My name is Wahab I am coming from Oakland and what brought me here was politics over the last two years and wanting to make more of a difference rather than passively kind of learning about everything. So I appreciate folks as kind of crowdsourcing some of these definitions and these concepts Most of what you had discussed is what actually encompasses the definitions that I had and I like a fool did not insert the slide on the textbook definition that I had and I will share that as a follow with them with you. So for people that said that with community it's people that have a shared culture or share the same neighborhood and you know share some commonality there we want to just kind of add a little bit to that definition and say that it's people who share a set of common values so values can be across faith traditions can be across socioeconomic lines if somebody cares for like the taking care of the the homeless or taking care of young students they share a common value and we say that community is defined by people who share a set of common values and going to relational as we get to know each other individually and folks have mentioned that you know being relational is that somebody who will like support you based on the relationship that you have with them and it's getting the idea of being relational is that you've been able to identify where there's a common overlap of values so it's based on someone's value that you have with them that they only have to do the work with your taken action or to support you in whatever it is that you do. Zarina mentioned power is the ability to move did you say people or resources so the textbook organizing definition of power is the ability to act and the ability to move people and financial resources so this is actually what an art scope of how we're defining power and then with community organizing it's enlisting grassroots leaders to tackle and resolve public issues local problems and large scale problems that are consistent again with our values. I keep honing back in on values and being relational it's we are being relational means that we are able to connect with one another on our values or we've been able to articulate what our values are and community organizing is being able to organize and mobilize individuals based on the values that you have around a specific issue or a clause so with self interest this is a concept that in many faith traditions and I've seen this play out in both Christian and Jewish settings people have a little bit of tension with this word so for us we try to say self interest is within a spectrum there's selfishness on one side where you're only thinking about yourself as an individual and then on the other extreme what would that be self-listness that you don't even consider your own values and your own kind of interest to be a factor in your decision-making so self-interest is right down the middle where your personal values and your personal interests inform why you make certain decisions and it's on this and it's intention or in relationship with self-listness because you're also trying to see if your values and issues that you care about are in alignment with the broader community that you belong to let's actually do quick introduction of the two individuals that just came in if you could just say your name where you're coming from and then what brought you to this training today 16 years now I've been involved with the master of MCC for quite a while on the board for the past this is my fourth year on the board I serve as one of the directors here so I believe for me my community has been my number one priority bringing up overall service to the community because we are humans and one of our foremost purpose being a Muslim and being human is to serve others and we can only do that with the proper channels knowing how to do it and I believe service is one way to reach other people my name is I live in San Ramon I came from San Ramon today I so didn't notice about this but that I'm interested in helping the community but it didn't really click that much to me but yesterday yesterday in San Ramon I serve here I see press allowed in I mean mention this program the importance of community organizing so I said I'll try to welcome and so going back to our definition so in listening grass self-interest as well so next campaign Baran mentioned this setting a goal and working towards it for us we define a campaign it may be an electoral campaign where you have to canvas but more so a campaign is something where you have a set goal that you're working towards and you've outlined a process towards it and that you've also created a specific timeline that your campaign is going to be for the next six months going to start on January 1st end on June 30th this is what we're going to do for every month in that process and we're going to see if we can get to that goal it does not necessarily mean that we may achieve our goal and I think it's indicative in electoral campaigns people are working for a set time is the day that they can determine whether or not their campaign is successful so for us a campaign is setting a goal working within a specific timeline and articulating a process towards it and once that campaign is done this is really important for organizers community organizers is you evaluate if the goal was achieved so if you've achieved it you kind of want to really capture what went well during that campaign what are things that you can do to improve and then if you did not achieve your goal then you also run that same kind of evaluation method what went well what are the things that we can learn from this campaign that we've engaged in for the next campaign that we want to work on and then thinking strategically what are the things that we need to change and so for organizers we often think that any kind of campaign any kind of action that we want to do that's time bound and that requires a process we treat it as a campaign and we always recognize that you know campaigns may have wins or losses we want to make sure that we're learning the lessons learning applying those lessons to the next campaign mobilization we mentioned it's moving people to action so that may be that you know you have a group of highly invested leaders that are going to be in the action from 6 a.m. making sure that they're set up to closing and breaking down an action or a rally or whatever it is but a mobilization in it of itself is being able to move large groups of people towards an action and activism and this is the definition that we are still dancing with an empower it's an individual or somebody that's invested and cares about their community and the care that they have for the community is again tied to their values and their values are what's going to be driving them to be active to build power does that make sense for folks cool so now we're going to jump in a little bit of how our faith values inform some of these concepts and how we actually use this to engage with the communities around us I'm actually going to jump into what slide did I actually got it so we are actually not a lot of people who here is familiar with the Hilful Fadoul would you like to give a quick summary of what that was and then I'll speak to you so there is as folks that who is actually wrong with wages and yet actually I've been wrong by the ways there was an agreement made that you know we are going to honor the rights of people that come in he may have been somebody that was of course the man that was involved in the trade dispute and so the past was that they would side the cooperation side against the oppressor regardless of its privacy and even if the one who is shown injustice is somehow far away tried against the oppressor's courage they will get the rights for the oppressor against the oppressor and so this in the Popesat elements that you know I've witnessed in the House of Abdelah treaty that if you were asked to uphold it in Islam you would do it and you would not give up this place for animals everyone had agreed that the rights of though they had all agreed so anyone who had had their rights taken away from them the pact meant that folks were going to be committed to returning their rights to them and no oppressor would have the hand over the oppressed so the Prophet S.A.W. this is actually very indicative this is before revelation the Prophet S.A.W. was actively involved in his community in his society and people had also seen him as a young man of a stature for being involved in this as well oppression child abuse racism and poverty impacts us all and the Prophet S.A.W. was actually involved in working on these issues prior to his prophecy and we wanted to kind of show this throughline that the Prophet S.A.W. and then the Islam that he had preached was kind of imbued with you know helping the oppressed and watching out like holding back the oppressor and we'll actually jump in a bit about some of the principles of prophetic organizing so this is work that you know our organization, Mass, Imam, MSA West had really kind of sought to distill and understand that you know there are elements of the prophetic tradition that really overlap with our community organizing principles so this first principle is that the Prophet S.A.W. was hyper-relational he knew everybody that was coming in to the community, he knew non-Muslims that were in the community and this was something that he had been very keen on we know traditions that Omar Ibn Khattab had you know was actually against the Prophet S.A.W. and when he came to meet the Prophet S.A.W. he had accepted as Islam meaning that the Prophet S.A.W. had engaged with individuals there's one story that I wanted to relate this was during the battle of the trench the Prophet S.A.W. was approached by a man from one of the tribes outside of Medina who had accepted Islam and he had the Prophet S.A.W. his name was Noaim Ibn Masud he asked the Prophet S.A.W. should I make my Islam public the Prophet S.A.W. said actually no keep it like quiet because he was connected to some of the Jewish tribes that were outside of Medina or that were planning to lay siege within Medina the Prophet S.A.W. advised him see what you can to sow discord amongst them and so Noaim actually informed the Quraizah that the Quraish he basically had sowed misinformation between the two opposing tribes that were against the Muslims to confuse them from actually laying siege and invading into the city of Medina this and the Quraizah and so the Prophet S.A.W. basically understood the power of relationship saying that here's an individual who had accepted Islam who wanted to do something for the community but the Prophet S.A.W. said be tactical and be thoughtful of how you're going to leverage your opportunity you have a relationship with two tribes that are against us how is it that you can help towards the situation of preventing the Quraizah from laying siege and so specifically around this Noaim had actually advised the two tribes that the Quraish would not invade unless you are supporting them and they have doubts around it and he had sowed misinformation around this and ultimately the two tribes did not actually invade and make a move against the Prophet S.A.W. and some commentators will say that Noaim was responsible for doing so and so I just wanted to illustrate again that the Prophet S.A.W. had thought very strategically with the relationships that he had the next piece is that he had taken councilor Shura with his companions we know that the Prophet S.A.W. from as it related to worship he had received revelation from Allah SWT and it was very clear but as it related to worldly matters he consulted often with his companions and so one of these incidents that we try to illustrate from an organizing perspective particularly around campaigns was around the battle of Uhud so the Prophet S.A.W.'s older companions actually advised against going out for a battle but it was a younger companions who had missed Badr and had energy for a confrontation that advised the Prophet S.A.W. to do so while the Prophet S.A.W. had there's indication that he had said that initially it was not his intention to go out so he had done it the reason that this is such a great organizing principle is that we as organizers we are going to take advice from the leaders that we have around us and that we're going to engage on a campaign around it and we mentioned that a campaign is something that's within a specific time bound so in the incident of Uhud the Muslims had taken a loss but the Prophet S.A.W. had followed through on this campaign and there was lessons learned from it and then we have revelation that also teaches us from the moment of Uhud so council is also another key component of within our organizing principles that sees a strong overlap the next piece is being a patient through strategic action so you know we want to keep in mind the long-term goal in space of like a short-term compromise do folks have any can they pull on something from the S.A.W. where the Prophet S.A.W. had a commitment towards a long-term goal that was a short-term compromise what did actually happen if you would like to share on that so Prophet and his companions were going towards Makkah and they were stopped and at that time Muslims who were with him they were kind of angry that why we were stopped and we should keep going and Prophet actually listened to his wife his wife gave advice that am I missing that's the Prophet agreed with them the people from Quraish came and they said that you can come next year but not this year and Prophet S.A.W. due to his wisdom Allah's help agreed with them but people were angry over with him that why we are on the right path why we do that and then his wife said that you go out and you do your archiving and all that so people will follow initially they were not following and so what was the point I'm telling this story of being strategic yes and then when they were returning Allah gave this revelation to Prophet that you are actually you have a big victory absolutely it was like a defeat but actually it was a big victory because it won so many people's heart and then he prevented a big conflict and from that and a year after they were victorious and that led to the for the month so that was the wisdom behind like long term goal and then compromising on short term that was a wonderful example and this is also another key example for us yep absolutely as communities as community organizers as well and this idea that you know just spelling like clarifying that so the treaty would they be that the Prophet said they were planning on making pilgrimage they were stopped and then they had to write a treaty that would prevent them from continuing this year and going on with the following year his closest companions were very disagreed with this decision and there was absolutely and that's actually the example that I had for this point led by example but specifically that oh sorry go ahead Rasha any Muslims that went from Mecca to Medina would have to be returned to Mecca and what that ended up happening was that like the Muslims in Mecca like went to the outskirts and like caused like division and caused trouble for the Meccans and so that ultimately like backfired even though it seemed like it was a victory for the Meccans at that time to us like these points are that you know this is very much in our community organizing work we may have leadership that we don't agree with their immediate decisions but we don't like if we are within a community and we share values and there's been like a structure that's been established trusting your leadership to that extent and then evaluating okay in this context as organizers we can say that this campaign was a 10 year campaign the peace was for 10 years and it yielded unseen benefits because the the treaty was broken prior to that and this notion of leading by example I often times get emotional sharing this because the Prophet said his companions were hesitant to complete the pilgrimage and his wife had suggested go outside of your tent and shave your head and then the companions will respond to you and the Prophet said he had done it and his companions had you know the narration say that they had you know was as if they had just woken up and they were like the Prophet said he was doing this we should have been the first to do this and not like have this hesitation or doubt around him also within this within this Hudaibiya incident there's also this notion that the Prophet said he was deeply disrespected by the Quraish right you know when he was asked to sign the agreement you know he was told to strike his name as Muhammad the Messenger of Allah and right Muhammad I should be more mindful Muhammad Ibn Abdullah and this actually deeply offended his community and the leaders around him and so we have to reckon these are lessons for us as organizers as leaders within the community that you know obviously we have some sort of some sort of like anger that you know our leader is being disrespected but we also understand that if our leader is making a decision that we will to the extent that it makes sense we will like you know follow through with it yeah and it comes to you know that that one was very very different because he was the Prophet peace be upon him and he knew he had the wisdom from God and that the revelation kicked him in this community that we are in we can't really rely on the group of people at the might be massages or group of leaders we cannot just really count on them to say what stay away don't do any activism don't do any of that because we believe on their rationale or their right I don't think that's the case and today's age I think it has changed I don't think yes if it was Prophet peace be upon him yes but if they make a decision that all the people in the community should not be activists they should not be doing anything for the community at large I think that's the wrong approach I don't I don't agree with that I don't know where maybe Brother Salah could tell us about it and where could we draw from and say that you know how can we change the minds of the people the community leaders or the massages are being in different areas how can we move them so that they can see that what they're doing is wrong we are they're not actually doing activism yeah I appreciate sharing that and there's like a little bit of like tension and how we describe that I for my purposes when we talk about organizing we're talking about like within a base where there is like a hyper relational culture where that the leader is constantly receiving feedback I can without getting to like some broader examples that I think are in the conversations now like the idea is that if you are within an organization or entity where it's like very clear that you're engaging in a certain campaign or certain action how is it that you still like you know may express that you know this does not fall tactically with my value like my issues there but I still want to be engaged around it sorry sorry no so I think actually I just lost my train of thought idea being that within like an organizing kind of within in a power organization this is what we'll refer to as community organizing groups within a power organization if there's been a set like campaign or a goal that's been set we oftentimes say that you know the organizers if say if I'm leading a campaign for empower change that's going to run for the gamut of six months and we've arrived to a decision-making process that I will like we are going to execute on this in the meantime we I have some staffers that may think that this doesn't make sense but we want to say that oh we are only going to try this campaign for this X amount of time and after that we can evaluate I think that's where the tension is for us like you know the reality is that the community is not as black and white or a textbook that you know we're going to follow a campaign A through Z but how do we kind of like insert kind of like an element where there's a lot of feedback and understanding and at the end of the day like what like certain certain pieces have to be for the campaign to move forward would make sense to continue on and then there's other channels of how you can push back I didn't I'm realizing opening up a can of worms around it but I'll take like two comments on it sorry I was just going to say that I think the point of the story or what I got out of it was not blindly trust leadership and and don't ask questions it was the concept of long-term victory versus short-term gain so it's not like oh leadership is telling us to do X and they're not giving us a rationale they're not giving us a reason it's illogical and we should just follow that illogical line of reasoning no the point here is there was logic in it it seemed like a loss in the short term but there was a rational argument for why in the long term it was worth the cost benefit was worth it so what I got out of the story was cost benefit sometimes isn't clear because you see a short term loss you see your ego being hurt but when you're doing that cost benefit analysis think bigger that's what I got out of it talking of leadership here we are not talking of our massage it's mom so if the sister is referring to them so if they say don't get engaged it's a different mindset they don't have the wisdom that the prophet had and what they're doing is not right and I don't believe in making all the massages and I don't want to go to a political part of it that's their issue to make the massage is saying that you're not going to be we are political I'm sorry you wear a hijab you're out there you have a beard you're Muslim you're political I don't care what you say you are political and that's the community we are in you have to be involved you have to move the issues you have to be in the community you can't just be isolated and put yourself in the bubble and say look I'm a Muslim and I'm doing good for myself no stop you got to move out in the community because you're engaged in this community and I don't think we can look at the prophet and say yeah the prophet had his own wisdom and the god gave him the wisdom but the fact that the leaders now they say that they are having they have the power and they are have the wisdom I don't agree with their wisdom because they are out of touch with reality they don't understand the reality what's going on in the community at large I think there's like a we will discuss it briefly or maybe we can actually make that pivot right now in community organizing sense what is a leader do folks have a sense anyone that's able to gather others around them to follow what they want someone that is good at doing that has that ability for some purpose yeah and you know so if you have a leader that people don't follow believe what they're saying and don't then maybe they're not that great of a leader yeah I should go right ahead I think a leader is someone who inspires people to want something as opposed to making their agenda someone else's priority like inspiring people to want the same thing so that they actually want to do them as opposed to like asking or even like forcibly asking them to do so so I think of being a leader as like an act of service where you have to listen to your constituents gather feedback and the benefit of having a leader is that they're a good decision maker like once there's a consensus they can act on it to add to all what you just said I look at the leader as somebody who's able and capable to institute even my note change in the right direction because that takes vision somebody with a vision that can actually make that vision a reality yeah and it doesn't have to be groundbreaking even my note small steps eventually if you are capable of doing so you will be regarded by everybody else as a leader yeah so that kind of leads to this point is a leader someone that necessarily holds like an official title or a role or like some office right yeah absolutely a change maker as organizers my first when I first got in as a professional organizer in Chicago my director gave me a list of 20 names and was like ish rock you're gonna call every single of these individuals set up meetings with them and start to get to know who the community leaders are and she's like don't be like fooled by a title of like you know this person is like the social justice chair at St. Thomas Catholic Church in Naperville Illinois like find out who are the folks that they work with in the community that are the people that are moving individuals and so for us we're trained early on to say that a leader is someone that will do a minute change do something that their their values are informing a vision that they have they're able to move people around them on it part of our challenge is like are we trained to expect that of course people that are in elected positions or invisible roles are leaders in a certain capacity as well but I know very well in Long Island if I need to make it like get some some activities happening my message the president the Imam or one thing I have to find out which uncle in the community is going to say that hey he like he may have a gathering for a barbecue in the middle of the summer I'm like after 4th of July that's the uncle that I know I can talk to saying that hey I need you to register everyone that's at your house for like voter registration and then bring that do that something visibly at the mosque so that other people take it on and so for us there's this notion that you know always identify individuals that are doing that are driven by their values and have a certain vision of what they're trying to do or if you're understanding that there's an individual that has the ability to move people understand what their values are and if you as an organizer have a vision that you know this this is something the direction that we should go in see if that leader understands where you're coming from and then see if they're able to motivate and mobilize people around them they're change makers bring that effect and kind of drive that change if the change shouldn't just stay with you if you really want to see it coming in action then it has to have an effect and it should be moving forward yeah absolutely so one of the other concepts that I going back to like some of these prophetic organizing principles that translate now is being open to unconventional tactics in the interest of time I'll move this long it said you know in the the battle the battle in the battle of the trench the Prophet S.A.W. actually consulted with Salman bin Farsi who said that oh let's just actually dig a trench which is unusual for the for the people in the the Arabian Gulf to understand and the Prophet S.A.W adopted an unconventional tactic in his organizing and again I'm treating that you know this campaign was an organizing campaign because we as organizers especially the Muslim organizers see these as like real like true lessons that the Prophet S.A.W was open to trying something that was different quote-unquote out of left field not tried before but came through like a trusted source and we want to think through with our organizing as well that you know it may be and I'm trying to think of like a pretty we so for us it's always when we do our civic engagement work at Empower or whatever work I've done in the past in New York we want to be able to get people making phone calls to Muslims one of the tactics that we discovered is that oh ask every single kid at youth group to get their cell phone from their older brother or their older sister because their parents are not going to give them cell phones and this is like 2012 2011 ish so they got their cell phones we just sat them down quote it's not in the spectrum of things being very radical or different it wasn't that unusual but it was unheard of that we had like seven or eight year olds making phone calls reminding people to vote and I had them be on speaker so I could hear some of these conversations and people were saying that oh you sound like you're very young like why are you doing this and so I can't remember the little boy's name but he was saying that you know I think voting is very important and my community and my parents are going to vote so I think you should too so it was just really interesting to hear just kind of it was unconventional the person on the phone was not expecting like an eight year old on the other end of the line but I was thinking that okay college aged kids that committed to doing phone banking did not show up I had a youth group that was there and I anticipated that hey like y'all are going to be there for youth group the hour that you're done make sure you get your cell phones from your siblings and then they were able to do that so just kind of thinking in our organizing realm like just nothing has to be like cookie cutter I mean you can just be open to thinking of different ways of making a going towards your goals and next we'll actually jump into relational meetings and so this is the whole idea of being relational is built on the foundation of doing one to ones we want to like get to know the people in our community and understand what their self-interest is we mentioned again what was self-interest or what was the spectrum that it lied in between between selfishness and selflessness so I myself may have an interest and I'll give a concrete example I moved to Los Angeles five years ago I came from New York so I was like I don't really need to bring my car I'm going to come to LA and just rely on public transit survive that until Sarah moved in with me but the idea was that I can get by on public transit and around my bicycle so I use that as like my individual self-interest of why I should be an advocate for public transit and then I ended up joining an organization Empower Change called the LA County Bicycle Coalition and their whole rhetoric was very different on paper we're a bicycle advocacy organization but in reality we recognize that public transit is not available in low income communities or communities of color so we are recognizing that the city is diverting a lot of funding towards different initiatives but if we want to see education and economic resources happening in like south LA or east LA how are we making sure that we're advocating for individuals that need public transit to get to downtown to go to work or to go to LA City College or get to USC or UCLA so there is this idea that my self-interest was that I a big believer in public transit my selfishness was that there's a larger systemic problem around inequality around public transit and we were at an organization that balanced the two that a lot of individuals on that staff were people of color that had been educated but came from working class backgrounds and that's how we had described the tension that we had or the dynamic that we had in the coalition because people had often times asked our executive director, even asked me it looks like you did a lot of labor organizing in New York, why are you in a bicycle transit organization and I was able to describe that my self-interest is around this and we see this larger systemic challenge so jumping a bit into the one, we want to be able to uncover when we talk to an individual what their self-interest is perhaps around a specific issue if that's the context or more so just really get folks to articulate the values that they live by because if you understand the values that they live by and they understand the values that you have then you'll be able to share that oh, you know what we both care about homelessness we both had a moment where I had some friends that I actually had a friend that I had not seen about 10 years when I moved to Los Angeles walking out of the Meshid and he was homeless and he told me Ashraq, he recognized me first and he's like do you remember who I am and I'm like it took me a second he's like don't you remember me from Boston and I'm like oh my god I do remember you and he's like hey don't tell the other individuals that I'm going through this kind of rough patch right now but I've been homeless in LA for like about a year and so I was like it surprised me but then I recognized that oh we had this Muslim brotherhood that we had in Boston and that here we are and then we were like myself and a few other individuals we looked at identified resources for him but the idea is that we were in that moment as the context was a little unusual we were still able to connect and understand that hey we shared like I was able to understand where he was what was going on and how we could support one another and so with that relational we wanted folks to like again speak to uncover an individual's values and then what are some issues that they may be of interest for them so when we do a one-to-one we realize that you know this is a very intentional conversation that we want to have with an individual so it's like saying that hey I want to kind of grab coffee or lunch with you for about an hour on Tuesday afternoon just to talk about you know some of the things that you care about and I want you to hear about some of the things that I'm working on like if it's on working on the Bernie campaign you can be very transparent and say that hey I'm working on this campaign was wondering like wanted to learn more about like what you're doing if this campaign is of interest to you but just kind of really recognize and know like what values you have around the election or what issues are motivating you towards it the other piece that as an organizer you want to identify is why does an individual care and this is around again their self-interest and their values are they somebody that's directly like affected by a specific issue or are they impacted so in that situation of relating to my friend that I had met in Koreatown in Los Angeles I wasn't directly affected by being homeless but I was deeply impacted that he was somebody that you know we would have dinner together he would crash in my like we were close and he was somebody that was somebody close to me that was deeply impacted and I or I'm sorry I was deeply impacted by it and that's what motivated me to wanting to do support or doing that work and we say that as organizers kind of try to uncover what is like the kind of emotion or the engine for why people do what they do and chances are it may be because they're directly impacted or they're deeply directly affected or deeply impacted by somebody that they are close to and then this question again what values drive their decisions have folks heard of like relational meetings and doing one to ones before cool so then we're so now I just kind of want folks to just turn to the person next to you and find we already spoke about this like why folks are here today but speak a bit more deeply and try to uncover like you know what's a value that drives them to care about the community and also like you know what's an issue that they do care about and what's the kind of value that they that informs that decision just take five minutes to do that if everyone can hear me clap once if everyone can hear me clap twice cool cool so I think we went a little bit over five minutes but one I realize that folks are having conversation five minutes is really not like the is too short of a time to get to know one another I just love to get again this is my opportunity to get to know how what folks are thinking what folks are feeling so I'd love to just kind of hear what folks have heard from their partners that they've been speaking to in terms of what brought them here some of the values that they have maybe we'll start oh we can do popcorn okay so I shared that you know I love to I mean I have this dream and wish that oh I want to impact the community I want to make a difference can I make an impact but I don't really know how so I'm hoping that coming here I'll be able to learn one or two techniques one or two tips that are practical that I can actually take with me and brother Abdullah just sitting beside me he shared some really practical tips with some of the things he does in his own neighborhood so with his neighbors and so on things I can run with that's very useful cool like a brother we shared some similar ideas one of my goals is when we moved down here was to actually be able to kind of have a sense of awareness of the community of course amongst the Muslim communities but also being able to have a good relationship with my neighbors and because of the fact that in the media for the last 18 years has been so negative towards the we all know about the stories that's happening as far as the negative press about Islam and Islamophobia in general so my wife and I our main goal has been to at least take the small steps and that is to actually lead by example and kind of teach the small steps that we can about Islam and what we know not you have to be very lead by example and also just be able to let them know that the fact that we're good people we have a good faith it's all about peace the small steps that we have taken it has gone a long ways now and quite honestly our entire neighborhood knows us and most of them are Americans and they really they have a different view of Islam now I would say when we moved in about 10 years ago and hopefully with today we can learn some more let's leave comments about 45 seconds to a minute per individual let's get a quick feel for them so we am is very passionate about tackling othering people so one of the reasons is because she just was in a program where there was a lot of international students and there were also white students and they just kind of sub segregated and the international felt students just felt very disconnected and they felt that they didn't belong and that really impacted her because she had a lot of international student friends and it's not a nice place to be and so that is something that she was a tackle and Rashid was inspired by a talk that we went to at Berkeley Robert Reich who's a professor but I never attended his lectures until we went to this extra event anyways he was talking about how sometimes leadership serves to undercut the people at the bottom and it was very powerful to Rashid to see thousands of people gathered and fired up about these issues coming from such a person who used to have high authority and he's from the inside so he knows what happens and how the system is not really set up for the people at the bottom and he hopes to empower people through the next presidential campaign to be involved and I guess he's just looking for better ways to connect with people and make sure that our values are what drives us in this next period of our lives. I think one thing that I think you brought up that was a good point was the necessity of us as Muslims also working on broader issues and in order to represent ourselves in the greater movement rather than advocating for us or even advocating for Islam simply because we are a minority and it's not going to be the default that people are going to care about us or care about what our struggles are. We have to both advocate for ourselves as Muslims but we also have to just engage and advocate for causes and work for causes that affect all of us so that we push this kind of vision that we are part of this community and we work on everything that affects our communities. So Mahab was concerned about Islamophobia and so he's concerned about how Muslims are looked up and perceived of and he wants to be more involved but they don't know how quietly and hopefully he'll get something out of it and have to be involved and do more to be that Muslims are good people in general and they do good things so we have to be involved I think. I mean at the end of the day homelessness doesn't affect me personally but I see people in my community affected and here in the Muslim CDC they spend a lot of money, hundreds of people on the list of Zakat money funds but we as a community are just sitting and waiting to see something happen so if I don't do it who else is going to do it? Part of the reason why I'm here is because I'm trying to learn there are some some competencies I guess you could say that that I have from being a leader in my place of work and I think they're similar to what we're learning here but I want to perfect that to become a better leader and I knew that by me coming to something like this I would meet folks like Salah who has a plethora of knowledge about the religion and how to how to sort of apply some of the fundamental aspects of the religion through social justice and advocacy and what not so you know just I guess taking more of a solemn approach of but just honored to be here and to learn as much as possible but some of the things that hit kind of close to home with me right now is homelessness I wish to create homefulness I've been in the Bay Area my whole life and I've seen gentrification I've seen a lot of folks end up on the streets including my friends some family members and you know I'm working right now with a group that's created safe car parks to sort of effect change in that aspect and also just really trying to move members of my community as an African American Muslim coming from an oppressed people marginalized part of the community I see the need for people like myself to stand up and help lead folks in the right direction yeah one one common value that we kind of discovered amongst the three of us was that we really wanted to see people from our community getting more involved within the American society on different levels so whether it's in decision making or among the young people in the community the children as they're growing up through different means some through creating opportunities to learn the language or for some of us influencing people in power and taking some of those roles that can influence policymakers and so that was what brought us here and what we hope to do with our different initiatives we have going on yeah so the sense of community is what has brought us here and that's what we were discussing utilizing our skills and capabilities what we are good at and applied for the better cause of serving the community not just your individual self or your own children or at home and that has brought an example I have been teaching my kids to learn Arabic because that's a connecting language between different people coming from the same faith and understanding your own religion it's really helpful and that was lacking in the local community colleges and high schools here so what we did is we did a survey how many people would like to have Arabic as a language taught in community colleges and so that was really taken by a full vigor and we were able to start the Arabic language in Diablo Ali College on campus so that was an effort really I'm so happy for that and our next step is to bring more languages from Middle East and from Asia to community colleges so Urdu and Farsi are going to be on the list and I'm already in communication with the that's hope for the best because I believe languages not only bring people together but cultures together and understand each other and that's what the goal is about to bring peace and harmony is also more for the low income society people and then I believe of me the reason for me being here is understanding relationality for really relationality being my driving force here my driving point to take home and to kind of be my foundation to keep building on the blocks that will bring the bigger change because until I understand relationality until I understand the values of the other people in my community we won't be able to understand the common goal and the common interest and I believe on the bigger spectrum the common interest is bringing peace and if you are able to explain to everybody that you're here to bring peace and harmony between all different cultures societies relationality is very important and I believe brother Chima's point was community organizing and community organizing and relationality go hand in hand you have to understand people and then kind of organize them and take them together of finding maybe making self their community self-interest your interest as as a leader I know it skipped over you better I'd love to 15 seconds I think what drives me is what I think ought to be driving any Muslim who aspires to become a Mormon which is to be activated to uphold social justice that's based on economic justice and environmental justice so that's my bigger encompassing values that I work tirelessly the last quarter century on all these three fields and number two the necessity and the need for us to be civically engaged and politically active and I'll do anything in my hands to start it here in the Bay Area and I intend to continue doing that thanks so I appreciate it and I was just taking notes this kind of understanding like where folks values and like kind of issue areas lie so like Sabine I know you mentioned you want to understand the relationality here I think I heard in the room that there is a strong concern or that folks want us to control like the Muslim community to be able to be known to the broader non-Muslim community and I think brother Abdullah Abdullah had mentioned that him and his wife you know I've gone out in the community they make themselves known to the neighbors and sister yeah this is Janice sure I mean I think what I'm hearing is that you know folks want to be able to control like you know how do we demonstrate that we're living out our Muslim values authentically and it comes around specific issues so for like sisters you know like you were mentioning that homelessness is something that you're feeling very strong about brandon you also mentioned that you know homelessness is something that hopefulness is something the vision that you have of bringing people towards the survey that you mentioned that you know having a medical and dental clinic so these are if our values inform the kind of work that we do of course it's like almost second nature that people will be like oh the Muslims are the ones that are doing this you're like you maybe you don't necessarily have to lead by your identity alone it is the work that you're doing that will speak volumes to the how you are represented within the community and of course you know that's maybe also like in a vacuum kind of statement we do understand that you know there is other media angles at play that you know that portray Muslims in a negative light but I think one of the key things that I've been recognizing is when people say that they're interested in doing something that service oriented it may not be like a glittery like political campaign but it's like something that's like bringing improvement and good to their local community and if Muslims are the ones that are visibly leading that the only thing that you have to do to kind of like add the right spin to it is like you know making sure that you're like finessing like the media contacts around it about the work that you're doing and that's something that we're learning at Empower as well that you know as long we're uncovering that you know many people are motivated and activated to do work on the issues that they care about how do we ensure that you know they're putting like a Muslim narrative around that work and Sabina I'm looking to you as a board member here too that there it sounds like there's an opportunity here to engage in many ways even with like this idea of like you know bringing language is like the key way of bringing bridging communities together right that's like a value in like what animates and motivates you that's something that can be always told as it creating an inclusive space too and so it's just kind of recognizing like you know and I think somebody you had mentioned that you know how do we balance and quote-unquote like prioritize with our self-interest as a community one it's literally putting it all on the table saying that hey I'm an individual that has interest in this I'm an individual has an interest in YZ and all that and then just kind of like and that requires a level of like you know familiarity and sharing being like not shy to share that like hey I'm not use myself as a punching bag example I love biking so like I usually lead in spaces that like with groups around me that hey I'm always about doing outdoorsy work like if there's something that we can do to bring youth from the youth group at the mosque or whatever group to bike around Los Angeles and do like a city tour let's do it so like it's just folks may know like if you are in a community and you're being relational you want to understand what are the different pieces that make up the community and then you can imagine yeah yeah hmm yeah we are so time-wise we're gonna take a break in about 15 minutes and I think we're probably so in 15 minutes we'll take a break then we'll have Doha at 1.30 then after we get back from Doha we'll eat and then we'll kind of look to wrap up some of the concepts around power here I'm gonna I'm actually not gonna jump into power right now but I wanted to kind of dig in about this this conversation about being relational I'll share one slide and then kind of dig back into some of the things that I think we can try and do different when we have relational conversations but let's go with this and I just wanted to again reaffirm the idea of relationships being at the center of our tradition and because we have a few bullet points I would love for just folks maybe go down a line just read one bullet point the next person reads the next bullet point out loud and again Omar said make a wish another man said I wish that this house was full of precious jewels and pearls so that I could spend it all and charity for the sake of Allah again Omar asked for the third time make a wish companions said we don't know what to say a leader of the believers at that point Omar said I wish that this house was full of people like Abu Abad Bajra Mu'adin Ben-Jabbal and Salim so that they can help me spread the word of Allah so this I wanted to I think I run into communities saying that hey like we can fundraise we can do this say in New York we can piece of it is like we can mobilize individuals but the key thing here Omar has been really well I just really recognize that it's when you have people bringing themselves and they're in community this is where we can make change and for Omar his message is very clear help me spread the word of Allah we all talked about making sure that Islam is known within the community our idea the thing that I want to drive home here is as we want to dig in get to know one another and we kind of form community or reforming community we really get to understand each other as individuals and understand what our strengths are and then I typically look to like the official leadership of a community saying that hey you should like have a strong sense that you know these individuals are down to do service by providing medical service someone else can provide mentoring for you someone else is actually tackling homelessness so you're actually making like a quote unquote like power analysis of the resources and strengths that you have in the community and these are individuals that you know help you kind of understand that your organizing base may not all be about repeal the ban but like understanding what kind of moves and works for people is a key thing as an organizer as a leader of any advocacy or power organization to build kind of the work that they want to do so do folks have other thoughts on this or reflections cool so I know I'm going to jump back to this slide on relational meetings I heard a lot of folks saying that you know they're like speaking broadly in the sense that you know we want to make sure that Islam is represented properly in community we don't know how to necessarily get involved some folks that opened up and said that you know they want to be working on homelessness or they're already active in doing work and then folks have mentioned that they want to be doing like kind of medical and like provide services for the the needy one of the things that we realize with relational meetings is that it takes time to get somebody to open up and be vulnerable or authentic and that requires like a level of trust one of the and I realize this I should we will share some like addendum like literature around this but in order for an individual we realize for somebody to be vulnerable and authentic to what they share we want you as the organizer to also share something that's important to you so part of it I'm not trying hopefully I'm not trying to feed my ego with like all the things that I'm sharing about myself like biking all this at the other but it's just a sense that you know these are the things that animate and move me and we realize that as organizers in individual conversations this is what's going to let allow that risk of preosity to happen that you know if folks may know that I like biking and someone else may share that oh I actually like I'm a big car enthusiast or whatever it may be like around that and we realize that when we're doing when we want to have relational conversations with individuals we say that it's an art of being able to share a bit about yourself and why you're motivated by certain values and then ask and then that also sets the stage so I think I may be able to ask like what brought you into this work like for like being like understanding that Islam is like you know is something that can activate individuals I know I may have shared that 9-11 the incident itself was not necessarily like that traumatic moment for me but I was filled with so much anger and rage at 16-17 seeing that you know the people in my community were saying that we have to maintain a low profile we should do this that the other I was reading Malcolm and Malcolm was very proud of his identity and kind of recognizing that you know there were systemic oppressions that were happening to him and he was able to connect it not only to black people in America but to a broadly like a world movement of people that are oppressed when I went into Boston there were people in my community that were being pressured by the by the FBI and one of my a good mentor of mine is now serving like a 25 year sentence on some on a charge I won't necessarily get into the details of it but these were the kind of moments that really fired me up saying that our community is being labeled in certain ways our community is impacting people that have genuine and pious hearts that are being pushed and framed and like criminalized and politicized in all these ways these were kind of the like motivating factors for me of why I wanted to do this work and then to me and I would connect it to that vision piece or the values that I have it's that you know I don't want individuals to be quote-unquote like marginalized or be without power have their story framed by somebody else therefore I am in this work and I want folks to be a part of it with me I'm only sharing that is that you know typically if individual in my organizing work folks will hear some version of that story around me that you know I've had formational moments from my teen years that drive me to do this work several years later like working odd hours always traveling we're like people ask like what's like your mission driven in doing this work you like shouldn't you be doing something else and like you know what there's like certain pieces of my own personal experience that drive me to do this and it coincides with my values as a person of faith because I saw the profits that I said these transform people in that way so all that being said I will look to share some kind of more guidelines and relational meetings and one of the things that we want to encourage folks is like the folks that are in this room and we'll talk about this after lunch like a kind of next step assignment will be that you know we want individuals to have one-to-one conversations with people that they're curious about in the community or they think they have a hunch that you know may share some values that you have but don't necessarily know where to plug in around a specific issue or you even recognize that there is somebody that wants to plug into something and you just want to know that out of a place of curiosity do they want to do they share the same vision that you may have around like an electoral campaign or doing like a like a core service issue that's needed within the community and so that to us like we realize that the relational one-to-one meeting is not a one part like a one-time appointment that it's a continuing relationship being relational means that there's ebbs and flows there are certain times that folks can be very active and the other times they may not be able to for personal reason professional health whatever it may be and we realize that this is the kind of mentality that we want to like kind of inculcate and internalize within our community that we recognize that you know it sounds like he's like a strong leader in my mind I could be like a transactional way I could be thinking transactionally that you know if I need to be in the Bay Area and I want to work with the group that's like ready to be like activated I'm going to come to MCC East Bay and the Yassin Foundation and that's like a very transactional way for me to think but then I should I want to kind of get down to that relational piece where Brother Saleh Hadid said that you know what like this weekend was not the right call for us to do Yassin Foundation to do a training there we should hold off until October November when people are back kind of you know I start to kind of recognize what are the ebbs of the kind of the challenges that he's facing and I'm fresh at asking individuals that you know as you're kind of looking to organize or being leading within your community understand these dynamics of the individuals that you relate with going back to that story and I'll stop here little little bit early before 115 my old director in Chicago Amy Wallace she told me a shock like I'm a little old school and I think you should do this too every individual that you meet with right like start keeping like a log in a notebook 2011 usually every individual one to one that I have for my work at Empower I keep like a log saying that hey I met with like Brother Saleh Hadid for example July 20th 11 o'clock got to find out who he is just know his on paper biography but also got a sense that you know I felt that he was really animated around this and this is what I encourage a lot of leaders and community leaders and organizers particularly younger folks it's easier for me to tell them like this is the best practice but to think through you know if you really want to be moving and moving people towards your vision and your cause be very intentional and best in the relationship know what kind of makes people tick what are the things that they're not comfortable with and you know act accordingly because you'll be you'll internalize being a more thoughtful leader and that you will also like be sharing more trust with that individual if you understand that you know they're not available to do this at this time or whatever it is you're talking about so I'll stop there I'm here to answer to your reflections yeah that we meet right but one problem is follow-up hmm so you meet people you introduce yourself and that's it you don't I mean I'll give an example and when the protesters are in on the spot we used to be kind of doing some things together I've not seen half over a year I didn't even call her hmm I mean I feel I feel ashamed to say that so I mean I don't even know if she was out on the country or something so just keeping it long and I think that's a great discipline right but how do you kind of keep in touch with people or just keep the log in case I need it in the future I'll just keep this record is that the idea behind that I so all the social media to keep up with folks hmm you don't lose people that way it doesn't take away years before you kind of reconnect every year you have these chances of connecting over holidays keep that practice on yeah yes on my own feet to doing things to go back and re-establish myself not being part of MCC being by establishing who I am going to work on and to be successful that I'm going to do it I have to make something for myself right so throughout the community doing the work I realized that we have the Muslim community has a huge amount of resources they have the doctors and dentists and I met with so many I'm meaning I'm a steering committee and housing committee in different organizations and they're telling me that they need doctors in the community so that they can serve or work on the weekends they need internal doctors to come and see the patients these are the low income families and the dentists who they have a clinic they just open a clinic they're Christians so how do we get the Muslims to come and volunteer showing up and there you're doing a Dawa right there you know it's my job now that the ball fell in my court that I have to find these doctors and tell them to go and volunteer in these places and be recognized by the community that Muslims are good people and they're doing work right what a great thing to do but this is the thing that I need to I myself need to get back on get involved more do more in this here and show that who I am and what I've done is was not in vain you know yeah so that that's that falls on me yeah and to answer some of those things as well like like it's inherent in our culture to be relational like spread to them to like give love to people during holidays and Ramadan is like this like such a there's like untold barak on that but one of those things that we see as organizers like oh man everyone's like kind of connected on this if you were had some sort of disagreement with someone like six months ago during Ramadan if you've like been in community with them breaking fast or praying or whatever it may be though I've seen those relationships are literally warm in my young age I've seen like in my little experience yeah kind of send a box of or something and they that really builds that relation yeah between them and us that they know that we're here this is something that we celebrate and we want to share that joy with them yeah so that's kind of like a building block again and they are part of our community and we all live together on this street so we have to build a relationship absolutely I would say I'm going to add this to kind of like reflect on as organizers we recognize that there's so many types of different relationships private relationships are folks with their family private relations are individuals that you like connect with at home or whatever it may be for organizers we really believe on this idea of public relationships so that you're cultivating a relationship with an individual based on like a common interest or values that you've articulated like in a public way and so that actually distinguishes that question was something you were asking like you know how do I stay in touch with individuals like at any given message you may on Juma you may give salams like I don't know 20 30 individuals but the individuals that you're most curious about make it like your priority to like you know reach out to them not necessarily all 20 or 30 but like you know 5, 10 people really stuck out to me for this reason and I want to further develop my public relationship with them and a public relationship from the organizing side is do we understand an individual's values do we understand what their self-interest is and like once that's kind of like the foundational kind of glue of that public relationship it makes it much more logical and easier to maybe perhaps follow up with them and I will in the same way that it's the adab of the Muslims that you know when you go to a certain city meet with the people of knowledge there like with an organizer parlance it's the same anytime I'm in a certain city if I'm in New York City I got to meet with Michael Geekin senior organizer from New York late 70s early 80s was one of my mentors it's just like a thing when I'm in LA like when I'm back in LA I got to meet with these folks when I'm in Chicago I got to meet someone from Iman City Muslim Action Network it's just like this it's a public relationship kind of ethos that we have and again I see those same parallels with us with an internally in our community I think oh go right ahead please introduce yourself and introduce yourself my name is Brittany and I just came in I heard people talking okay about a classic welcome Brittany I think it's 115 we'll take a break now because I think the hers at 130 and then after the are we going to have lunch in this room in the banquet hall cool is that okay I would also ask I'm going to pass that around a laptop with just like a sign-in sheet if you could fill it out also like so folks it'll be easier for folks to get in touch with each other if they need to with that and like interest areas I think it'll make it easier for us maybe to put you in touch or like if folks typically with the postcard I usually add them on a spreadsheet and then I'll share that with you that might be if folks have these my Muslim vote cards just put your name, email and phone on them and then within the next like before next week's training I'll share that with you you know there are policies and initiatives and things like that so if we're saying that power is the ability to move money or resources what did the Koch brothers do what are they the money and the resources to the candidates ahead of time and they're putting better on it so they're giving it to multiple candidates and hoping that once they get elected they will do what they ask them to do that's what power is what are some other examples of power thank you for that go ahead try to blackmail Ilhan Omar so like the IPAC and she just said something but because they didn't like her they started saying she was anti-Semitic and all that stuff and then they were using the media and other grassroots support to paint her black so being a bit more specific towards that how and I can think of an example on the other side so if there's power being used to kind of garnish or hurt Ilhan politically how is their power being used to support her back or up so cool I think we may be going down I don't want to necessarily get into that example go right ahead I think that we've seen a lot of dialogue but I think that the people who came to support her welcoming her back into the airport and physically being behind her I think is what gave the other side power to respond to Ilhan as a symbol of power as well as how AOC Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won just in that case it would be like moving people behind them and moving people to vocalize behind them as well and support them yeah so I think specifically so one there is power exerted by funding by different groups to kind of portray Ilhan as anti-Semitic when she was making anti-Zionist statements whatever like the critique being there but there was funding put there there was people power to push in the other direction so you know at the time that Ilhan initially made those statements back in January or February the house speaker had decided that they were going to introduce a resolution against anti-Semitism people had mobilized care was involved and power was involved to pressure Pelosi's office to say that no this should not be a resolution on anti-Semitism it should be a resolution on anti-Semitism anti-blackness and like all forms of discrimination and so the resolution that was actually meant to introduce to kind of be like a political hit on Ilhan was completely lost of its teeth because people had mobilized pressured Pelosi to introduce a joint like a resolution bill that was much more inclusive and so that was another instance of exerting some power and so I just wanted to I also want to think of power in a much more hyper-local level so this is the picture of a local election for neighborhood council in Los Angeles I took this photo as I was waiting on lines for a local neighborhood council election for three hours I was online for three hours I don't even remember if you were in town that weekend Sarah so this was for a neighborhood council election that usually since the neighborhood council system has been instituted in LA in like 1998 the most people that have come out to vote have been like maybe 10,000 this election had like 19,000 people turn out the poll there was two polling locations for this specific election on a specific ballot initiative but it took three hours it was unheard of I had dinner plans I missed them completely and I had to take a photo I was like what's going on here there was some organizing going on here without necessarily getting into the issue or maybe I should so basically little Bangladesh had petitioned to take half of Korea town and designated as little Bangladesh Korea town which has been around for 20 30 years was saying that we are not having any of that so they actually flexed and mobilized their power the reason there was 19,000 people that turned out the Korean like business association and some other Korean cultural association was but we're busing in voters from all over LA and some from Orange County and they're allowed to do so to vote for this so I should have stretched this picture out but there I was just taking a picture and documenting that people were coming off of buses to vote at the polls normally an election that takes maybe 200 300 people that usually turn out this had 19,000 this is like the second highest voter turnout for a neighborhood council in the history of the neighborhood council system last 20 years in LA and so that is power there's an interest group that said that we have to turn out voters we're gonna do whatever it takes we're gonna bus people in from Orange County unlike on a Wednesday or Thursday and have them vote and like everyone had spent two or three hours at the lines so yeah but in that situation it was a couple of churches that volunteered the buses I started asking okay what's going on it was like some several churches that had volunteered their buses to work in coordination with these associations and the associations were also providing water and snacks so I was able to get some snacks I'm like yo it's like I've been waiting online for two hours it's pretty hot and people were just giving away like whatever they whatever they can to help that so there was a demonstration of power there of like folks pooling unconventional resources bus food and moving voters yeah the Muslim community so we're so like they're Pakistanis they are Indians they're in Indonesia and whatever we're so split each other so much that we forget about working unity so I'm working I'm very much involved with the Genesis vocal and I see how they run the place and I know how they work they go they don't go to individuals and that in a church and ask them to come and join they actually go to the priests of the church unfortunately most the massages they don't have a you know Imam so are the leader and they say will you join us in doing that so it comes the movement all their movement comes from within but it comes from the leaders of the church so within the church organization they know okay how many people they will ask individual priests how many people can we count on you on that event and they give a number if you don't show up with that number the next time they will come and crucify you basically they on the meeting they get embarrassed they put them down and I mean it's not I don't think that's the right thing of doing it but that's their way of doing it that's public accountability so you have to be but so they involve the church and the leaders and the Muslim community where do you see the different master doing anything together so I mean that is leads to discussions of how you structure your example okay for bringing that up so there we go so we often say within organizing that there's two ways of how power often plays out there's dominant power which is you know someone pushing power over you saying that hey you have to like there's martial law there's a curfew everyone has to be in at 8pm or there could be relational power which is lateral and it's you know an elected official consulting with community members saying that hey this park needs to be open late because kids need to place to go after school and so we say that there's these two kind of ways of power can you guys guess what kind of power we prefer when like the community organizing side yeah and so that actually means we're not we're not gonna shy away from working with people or working on with systems that don't share our values we're just gonna say that the terms of how we relate you as an elected official that may be a tea party elected official in one part of New York you have three of the largest mosques within like a hundred mile radius you're gonna have to you know provide support for these communities in the ways that they need if it's around zoning whatever it is so the idea is that when we when communities engage they want it to be lateral but there's a way of how you like engage with elected official so one they respond to the power of like votes and funding and when you're in a dominant power dynamic when you have like a hyper conservative or somebody that an elected official that's in a power position that does not share your values you have to understand and recognize that you know that's the dynamic that they understand then you have to start thinking what are the versatile tactics to like pressure them around is it like a public media campaign to make them look bad because they don't want to lose the popularity of like their of their like a chance for winning an election down the line and so the and I'll kind of share this photo right here or explain a bit about this can folks see what this photo is of yeah so this is actually in Congress in front of House Speaker Paul Ryan's office Sarah do you remember what year this was 2017 yeah I think last year yeah before the flip so this one was specifically around when President Trump had announced that he was going to phase out DACA deferred arrival for undocumented youth on a pathway to citizenship so our organization as well as several other organizations had decided that you know we're going to take faith leaders to go to the House Speaker and encourage him to reconsider and like introduce a clean immigration reform bill act Paul Ryan's office did not want to meet with us so what if we actually anticipated that so we realize that there is a power over situation his office was not even going to meet with us we decided relationally what are we going to do we're going to have a slew of faith leaders I think there's about 20 or 30 of us there that we're going to sit down in front of his office and do a civil disobedience so we got arrested we were in jail for like or we were held detained for a little less than half of a day and an interesting note with this Imam Omar Suleiman from Texas was part of this group and he got arrested with us and I was asking him like okay so like why are you doing this this like he flew in from Dallas that morning was outside for some of the speeches and then we immediately mobilized inside he's like a shock I actually have to leave right after he was planning to leave right after the action and so you know we got the group had gotten arrested and then while we were being detained all everyone cell phones all their electronics were being confiscated but as soon as we got out I'm looking at my phone and I see a slew of social media saying that Imam Omar Suleiman got arrested we need to find out if he's safe is there going to be a bail all this that the other Imam Omar I think as soon as he got back to Texas he had message saying that you know I got arrested for a reason I had you know wanted to demonstrate that you know faith leaders care about documented youth within the community and there are Muslims here not even that he like mentioned that statement and the following day he had a conversation like this like a table conversation at his Islamic center I believe where it was him and two undocumented Muslim youth speaking about the like providing education around DACA and why it's important that there should be a pathway to citizenship so like he had used an opportunity and like flexing the power of moving people because people are very agitated and why did he get arrested what's going on and use that opportunity to use this power to provide more political education for folks to push around like immigration reform and as folks know as it stands right now the Supreme Court's going to make a decision on whether or not Trump's executive order on rescinding DACA is constitutional and then there's always this continual legislative advocacy push to advocate for clean immigration reform and so this was one of those dynamics that I just wanted to describe a little bit of power next we're going to just break up again into groups so it's 245 right now is it okay if we go over to like 310 or do folks want to and I'll do that whatever the group feels if does anybody if anyone has an opposition you are will break at 3 o'clock so that folks can leave and then we'll continue to wrap look to wrap at 310 so the I want to maybe have folks break off into pairs and let's literally just spend two minutes an individual telling a story of how you were acted on by a dominant power and if there is anything that you could have done about it and a dominant power being like you know a government institution law enforcement and or like corporation anything that gives an example of like how power was exercised in a way that you as an individual did not have power but there was one power was only coming from a one way path so folks just want to break into pairs and speak to that tell each other and then I'm only going to take maybe two stories of that in that moment perhaps not but that was the moment where you're like okay there's power over every year I think in the aftermath of that action demonstrated have it for yourself make of them not being able to see their grandparents and their cousins and uncles and aunts and you know and so I think that's definitely a active dominant power maybe we'll take one more quick example I think the closest one because it's quite a few of them but last Wednesday Tuesday night I heard that the city of council of UC of Berkeley is just about to drop the discussion on the banning of facial recognition technology now there is an organization here that they helped with the city of Oakland to get it activated and they have started a commission and the attorney who's there leading it is just an incredible person so San Francisco adopted that the board of supervisors about three weeks ago ban facial recognition technology from being in the future is the technology is already there just needs somebody needs to switch it on this stops the switching from happening then Oakland approved it on Tuesday night and Wednesday I heard that and I got a very strong message that Berkeley was going to drop it so Tuesday night at 10 p.m. I have a law not to call anybody that I found myself really texting anyway so by Wednesday noon which was very hard to get people out of their job I was able to get six people to talk to the city council passionately including I I started it with a reference to the blockbuster movie minority report if anybody can remember that and it apparently it struck a nerve with a lot of people anyway now the legislation and the ordinance is on agenda for next meeting to be voted on and I'm quite definitely sure it will be a positive to stop it from happening so I guess that the lesson from this is that organizing does work and if you can react fast the problem is majority of us in the area will live in a bubble everybody's working for a high tech company and everybody's basically enslaved by this so called motion of career which is another discussion thank you yeah I think so the example is a little bit of power with how do they engage with elected officials to kind of move or push back on surveillance thing which has been like all eyes are on this campaign right here the work around surveillance pushing back on surveillance technology so I now I want to jump into like we talked about different kind of modes of power and I really wanted to jump into like the one of the organizing kind of frameworks of how we view public life and this is simple and it's a little bit reduced but I think it covers a lot of like the organization entities of how we relate publicly so again I want to make the distinction that there's a distinction between like an individual as a private individual and then someone that engages in the public so I as a private individual having to ride my bike but I as a public individual advocate for creating bike lanes in the city that I belong to I'm independent of who I am privately so when we say in public life is where decisions are being like decisions and policies are being enacted and legislated on so we say that within public life there are three main kind of sectors where power is being exerted so the first sector is the public sector the public sector is where there's elected officials either at the municipal level state level or the national level and then agencies that are operationalizing and you know using your budget like our tax dollars too like you know do everything from like public safety and to like paving the streets to like like regulating on like health through the FDA so we say that you know within that sector the power is within those people and those elected officials and those positions and the values that they have is you know is the value for the public sectors that exert a certain level of administration and control around in public life the next sector is the private sector and so the private sector we say are typically corporations or companies that look to whose value is to maximize profit so if you're in and again this is where there's a little bit of reductionist happening reductionist definitions but in the private sector ideally or theoretically an organization is looking to maximize their profit and are not necessarily informed by ethics or morals or concerns of a community so if a developer comes in and wants to build a slew of condos they may not even be thinking of building in affordable like a 20% allowance for affordable housing units and so we say that in the private sector or companies and developers are informed by their their their main value is maximizing their profit and so then the last sector is a civic sector the civic sector is typically what organizers have defined as you know families religious congregations that show up publicly this is a publicly registered space as a nonprofit is an entity where people come and congregate together and they're there in participating in public life because they are within the community and in relation with other organizations around we say labor unions civic associations and advocacy nonprofits are also within that same realm of the civic sector what we say is that the values for the civic sector can be varied we wrote all other motives but the idea is that a religious congregation their values may be motivated by altruism or doing like a propagation like doing Dawa or if it's like a nonprofit that does believes in conservancy their value is to make the earth like more sustainable or environmental friendly and the power that they have excuse me is their ability to organize people and money we often say that in the civic sector finances are probably not on the same scale as they are in the government sector in the public sector or the private sector but there is fundraising that can happen change that can happen at the hyper local level we're mentioning at lunch that Ayanna Presley who won in Massachusetts her campaign budget was $100,000 which is like unheard of like a very miniscule budget to win at a federal level so the idea is that the civic sector may not be deprived of organizing funding we just have to think through like what's the best are there other resources that we can mobilize and organize around the key thing the other kind of lasting lesson I want for us to understand in public life is we try to imagine public life in these three sectors as a stool a stool will not stand up if one of the legs is broken so if you have a one leg if it's a government sector that it's over extending its reach that it's longer than the others then the public life will be crooked same thing goes with the private sector and same thing applies for the civic sector we actually need to have engaged individuals and engaged civic organizations that can compete or engage in power dynamics with the other two sectors I would illustrate that do folks have any questions or thoughts around this is this the first time that they've seen this kind of explanation of public life cool so when so when we've mentioned that you know within the civic sector money may sometimes be a challenge for to fundraise on the same scale as the private and the public sector we can do to actually build our people power and so this concept of base building is what comes in and this is actually going to tie into what our next step is base building is this idea of growing a group of leaders by understanding like building relational ties with them to understand what are your value what are the values that you have are their common values that we have that motivate us to be on the same side of an issue and within that base building we're engaging in public relationships we're asking folks that you as an organizer you're going to be making asks to individuals to help implement whatever vision or cause that you have and so when we're base building the idea is that we're talking to a lot of people within our community who we may have a hunch shares the same values as us or may even further share the same position on an issue the thing is you want to get folks together in a room and start organizing collectively in a community organizing is something that you know when you're organizing people collectively towards an issue or a cause that's what community organizing is and to us the fundamental piece is base building so the idea is you as an individual may have had one to ones with a dozen people the next step for that is all those individual conversations you've had you want to bring a little bit of synergy to that let's bring people together in a room and have a larger conversation around that issue that we have and I'll share a quick story around this this was in April 2012 I was driving back from Chicago to New York my cousin who lives in Canada gave me a call and I missed his call and he just texted me or something said hey give me a call back got to talk to you about something so I call him up and I'm like hey it's not like him what's going on and he goes like hey I just got to be like up front with you Sajid just was diagnosed with cancer and I was like oh Sajid is my nephew he was about 8 years old at that time so there's a little bit of silence and I'm like okay so what do we do and he's like I'm not sure but make do our right now your other cousins coming from Virginia up to Canada to kind of and she's a doctor we're going to just kind of see like what the next steps are so through that long drive and several phone calls between Chicago and New York my cousin who went to Canada to finalize she was just like okay we recognize that there's a gap with South Asians on the bone marrow registry so what we have to do is one everybody has to do a cotton swab in our family and our extended family to see if there's a match there and just be entered into the registry and then two we have to like just create more of this awareness around it and so as I'm driving through and she's telling me this I'm like okay what am I going to do I'm going to go back to New York after I've been in Chicago for about a year what I ended up doing is I went to my mosque and I was like listen guys like I started talking to some of the leaders there and some of the youth group kids that I was working with and asked them like okay guy they were telling them that there's this issue my nephew it's a very personal selfish interest thing has been diagnosed with leukemia the only probability for his like his cure is like getting a bone marrow match which they have not found right now what we're going to do is I want to have a run a bone marrow registry a cotton swab registry at all the South Asian mosques that I can think of within Long Island Alhamdulillah and actually this is before I was married to my wife Sara we had helped coordinate some of that in Minnesota where she was from but at that time I was I had a sense of vision that I was hit by a personal moment and I knew that the vision was my pathway to a solution was get as many South Asians on the registry as possible and I was like okay I have to start building a base so I got in front of some of the uncles asked them you know this is what I want to do went to Jomah made an announcement saying that hey we're going to be doing this cotton swab drives next Jomah and then I needed to find then I needed to find a base of youth I was going to do the work with me so I recruited made the pitch to a slew of kids that from like 12 to probably like freshman year of college to hunt me out and on that day the following Friday I think we got probably like 40 or 50 folks our mosque congregation is relatively small but on that first we got 40 or 50 we continued for the next couple of weeks and we made sure that everybody within our extended family in New York was also registered so to me that had some kind of teachable moments of what base building was and that my initial cousin who went from Virginia to Toronto she was the organizer in this she tapped every single cousin of ours saying that y'all got to get registered put your cotton swab thing on the registry and see what we can do to maximize bone marrow registrations and then I would say that I played a small role in that because I was able to find a base of youth group leader youth group kids that ended up doing like being bought in on this vision that you know they don't want to see like a young kid suffer and they also recognize systemically that South Asians are underrepresented in the registry so we were able to identify on values and I had I made a specific ask I asked them to help volunteer with it and they had done it so that story in and of itself my nephew he did return to Allah actually later that year but he did find a bone marrow match it was that the chemo had been too intense for him and upon Allah Allah's the best of planners but he had we had whatever our campaign was we did whatever was within our means and then and we did what was within our means and we knew that all things come from Allah but we I saw that as a success because the youth that I engaged with we became tighter and I was several years older than them and I was able to tap into them for 2012 2013 excuse me 2014 for all the other electoral campaign and other issues that we were working on within our mosque there and it all started with you know a simple base building ask like hey can you commit to doing this kind of work then we understood that we shared the similar values and we had a vision of how we can improve our community and then 2013 we did voter registration at that mosque also at the end of 2013 we drove we were going and canvassing in different areas so the idea is that when you're base building it's you use specific issues perhaps as an opportunity to engage and recruit people make an ask but it's not a transactional relationship after that quote unquote campaign was over I've just found a group of folks that are ready to put in the work and to do to do whatever it takes to like help improve the community and that's how we want to kind of imagine what base building for us is that you know the individuals that we're working with right now it may not be their priority and self-interest to work on this specific issue but they share the same values as you and it starts by asking like making a concrete ask around a specific issue the folks that you know end up working with you or chances are there they're going to be the ones that are going to work with you on campaigns beyond that and just kind of building a bit more effective asks are based on relationships so these are actually mahad and al-maruf these are two of the guys this is them doing voter registration work probably in 2013 yeah that looks like our office but these are the two kids that I had mentored through youth group that were the two al for sure was one of the volunteers that was like making sure that people were doing the cotton swab doing all the little things that showed to me that hey he's somebody that was activated and motivated enough that he would do something without me actually pushing him around it and mahad is actually one of the most charismatic canvassers that I had met so I got to know these two individually and knew what their strengths were and they trusted me enough that okay you want us to canvas in New York after so not after hurricane sandy but in November it gets pretty cold in New York temperature drops in the 30s and 40s these guys it also helped that we were paying them we had to stipend for them but they were committed to doing civic and getting doing voter registration work and knocking on doors but this all came because I can I try as consistently to organize the leaders that I've worked with I understand where like what's motivating them why would they be interested and they understand that I'm transparent in an open book the reason that we're doing this work and so we want as we're doing this base building work we want to know as much as we can about that person what do they care about and why do they care about it the second picture is at the Arab-American Association of New York this is actually this past this is past November so we were doing our broad my Muslim vote campaign where we're making sure that individuals that had most of that these are just voter rolls I think we're making phone calls to Muslim voters to make sure that they were turning out for the midterm elections and again so the Arab-American Association of New York there was an organizer there it was Reem and Noah that was able to organize and bring out aunties and like a women led group doing the civic engagement work and it's because of the relationships that they had so the kind of piece around like in base building is that not every individual will do everything that you ask of them and that's completely okay and in the same way that we say that you know we're doing and power change is doing on my Muslim vote campaign we are very much aware that there's several individuals in our community that are not eligible to vote may not be citizens but can still be involved in different aspects of the campaign so we really buy into this theory of this ladder of engagement and I'll read this for time's sake I'm sorry it's 310 so if folks need to leave I can make a move I apologize but I heard the message of Allah whoever of you sees an evil let him change it with his hand and if he is not able to do so then let him change it with his tongue and if he is not able to do so then with his heart and that is the weakest of faith so our idea is that different people will enter public life work at the level that they're comfortable at we want to always create the pathway to say like if we have a vision for a campaign or the work that we're doing like we want to see you being able to do XYZ work but we will meet you where you're at if I had a volunteer REL who is looking for community service hours from a local community college she did not like getting in front of people and registering voters talking to them face to face but she was great at talking on the phone the minute that she was able to express that to me I was like okay that's a no brainer you don't have to go outside in like 30 degree weather just kind of stay inside drive phone calls and we'll like make that work so that like it was just kind of recognizing where individuals were at and making the accommodation in your work plan or in your campaign to do so so that was just a bit around base building and the exercise that we're going to do I'm like two slides from wrapping up is going to be around like how do we think intentionally about building our base and like recruiting people to our vision so I want to do lift up a few things Zarina has been passing around the agenda to change our condition book by Sheik Hamza Yusuf and Imam Zaid and there's a chapter specifically on civic engagement and social justice this is a classic I recall reading it several years ago but I had to ask you what chapter the condition chapter 5 on being engaged in the community the other book that I wanted to share is he runs Care Michigan he wrote this book earlier this year towards sacred activism and in this book it's a bit shorter than that book but he ties in that our faith values and our desire and like our command from Allah SWT to do good and to forbid the unfair is what should be driving us to be active in our work so I recommend this book as a way to kind of think through what is a bit of our visioning as spiritual people in public life of why we're motivated to do work and the reason I say this is because this is the kind of work that resonated with me when my mass leaders at Muslim American society were telling me that it's our religious it's part of our religious practice to wanting to improve the communities around us and I will wrap there before we go into the exercise I know I just kind of rushed through power-based building and vision and mission but I just love to kind of get some quick thoughts or reflections on those three pieces we're also different as a person as an individual so the person that you're building relationship they're not technically your family and you don't look at them as a family but you're working on these issues on the transactional level and you take it at that level and take anything to heart and personal and you work on issues and I think one of the things that's one of the things I would say about this kind of work it's hard but you know we are Muslims we are brothers in faith but in sisters but at the same time I think we should look out at the bigger picture how it has been working so far yeah absolutely I was just going to bring up really quickly I probably should have brought up earlier but so it's just been my experience in life that you know with money comes power I think we all kind of realize that that's a big end and going back to the public sector versus the private sector versus the civic sector just wondering your thoughts with like how important it is to seek out grants and opportunities from the public sector for the civic sector because there was no line drawing that connection in the chart sure yeah and I think that chart there can always be layers added to it but in terms of funding we understand that ishraq as an individual may be part of the civic sector but say if ishraq is a local elected official he's in the public sector and if some ishraq is in the private sector and he's a donor then we look at him that way so we recognize that there's actually a lot of lines of how powers engage across the sectors and the picture becomes a bit more complicated of how we engage the key thing here is just to understand that hey if I'm in the civic sector and I need to work with Mayor Eric Garcetti who's been terrible on issues of surveillance but he has made a public commitment to work on resolving homelessness by creating like I love this hopeful term like building more affordable housing in the city of LA guess what we're going to work with th