Financial Services for Collective Impact and Sustainability

Eaman Shebley, Kashif Osman, Irshad Rasheed & Hud Williams TACS · Crescent Wealth · Stearns Salam Bank · Saturna Capital · 80 min

Four Muslim financial professionals on the architecture Muslim nonprofits keep skipping — and the $700 billion question hiding in plain sight.

The most operationally dense session of the summit pulled everything into one practical question: what is the financial architecture that turns Muslim nonprofit work into Muslim nonprofit institutions? Moderated by Eaman Shebley, with Kashif Osman of Crescent Wealth, Irshad Rasheed of Stearns Salam Bank’s Islamic finance division, and Hud Williams of Saturna Capital.

Your Endowment Is Your Organization’s Retirement Plan

Your endowment is a retirement plan for your organization. It allows you not to have to think about raising money every year just for operations.— Hud Williams

The frame collapses what most boards treat as a luxury into something genuinely intuitive: retirement security. A nonprofit without an endowment is an individual without retirement savings — operationally functional, structurally vulnerable.

The $700 Billion Question

There’s about $700 billion of wealth within Muslim communities, but only about $50 billion is invested. The rest is sitting in cash, eroding to inflation.— from the panel

The implication is stark: the Muslim American community sits on roughly $650 billion of uninvested capital, much of it losing value to inflation, while every Muslim nonprofit fundraises in scarcity mode. At a 4% return, the panel noted, that gap alone would fund the entire sector.

The Case for Muslim-Owned Financial Institutions

You will always be on the other side of the fence if you don’t have your own financial institutions.— Irshad Rasheed

We came together to build masjids and schools, Irshad argued. The next institution to build is financial — because a community without its own banks is a community whose capital flows on someone else’s terms.

A Sharp Corrective

Not every panelist pitched their own product. One of the most useful moments came from an audience member’s caution that new organizations should not start with endowments — operating solvency comes first, institutional longevity second.

If people are trying to make an endowment out of their light bill, they’re going to have a nice endowment with the lights off.— Hud Williams

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