Creating Inclusive Partnerships

Joohi Tahir Co-Founder & Executive Director, Muhsin · 42 min

1 in 3 Muslim households in America has a family member living with a disability. Joohi Tahir on why most Muslim organizations have committees for everything except the people they’re already overlooking.

The keynote opened with a statistic that should land harder than it does in most Muslim nonprofit conversations: roughly 1 in 3 Muslim households in America has a family member living with a disability. Joohi Tahir, co-founder of Muhsin — the national Muslim disability inclusion organization working with more than 130 communities across North America — made it concrete with her own story. Of the seven homes on her cul-de-sac, three are Muslim households, and all three have a family member with a disability.

It’s Not Just the Wheelchair

It’s not just the wheelchair. It’s not just the wheelchair.— Joohi Tahir

Disability is far broader than the visible conditions most organizations picture: physical, mental, developmental, and learning disabilities, congenital or arriving through injury, illness, or age. Inclusive design, she argued, is never just for the named beneficiary — the automatic door installed for a wheelchair user also serves the parent with a stroller.

Where Is the Disability Committee?

We’ve thought of everything in our masjids — the youth committee, the women’s committee, civic engagement, elderly services. But we hadn’t thought about the people. We didn’t have the disability committee.— Joohi Tahir

The reason isn’t malice, she argued. It’s invisibility. Muslim families with disabled members have, for decades, simply not come — not because they were absent, but because the space was never built to receive them.

Why “Build It and They Will Come” Doesn’t Work

A masjid commissions a sign language interpreter for one Jummah, no one attends, and leadership concludes there’s no demand. But the families exist — they just learned long ago that the space wasn’t for them. Trust is rebuilt over months of consistent, advertised accommodation, not a single gesture.

Inclusion as Strategy

Muhsin runs 30+ weekend schools, respite care, mental health groups with licensed facilitators, and an adult day program — where 80% of attendees are non-Muslim. The lesson echoes the whole summit: the people missing from your table are the ones whose absence is shaping the work you produce.

If you accommodate for someone, they’ll come back to you. They’ll become donors for life.— Joohi Tahir

The 3rd Annual AMCF Nonprofit Summit is in Detroit on September 3, 2026. Theme: Community Building.