Some philanthropy stories are about a single gift. Others are about building the infrastructure that makes future gifts possible. Dilnaz Waraich‘s work — and the conversations she’s been part of for the better part of a decade — sit firmly in the second category.
Dilnaz is one of AMCF’s earliest Outstanding Philanthropist Award recipients, and on the Muslim Philanthropy Podcast she came on for her second appearance to talk with AMCF Co-Founder Muhi Khwaja about two ambitious projects she’s been instrumental in building: the Community Collaboration Initiative (CCI) and the Year of Learning. Both share a thesis that has come to shape much of the modern Muslim philanthropy conversation in the U.S.: that the work of Muslim-led nonprofits is mission-driven and excellent — and that what’s been missing is the infrastructure to make collaboration, trust, and mainstream philanthropic engagement possible at scale.
Reclaiming the word philanthropist
Dilnaz opened the conversation with a reflection many Muslim donors will recognize. “When I was younger,” she said, “I always thought a philanthropist was a rich white man.” It’s a quietly important admission, because it gets at something structural. The word philanthropist in the American imagination has historically pointed to one kind of person — and Muslims, who have been giving zakat and sadaqah for fourteen hundred years, have been left out of the frame.
Reclaiming that word, Dilnaz argued, is part of the work. “Muslims have been philanthropists ever since the time of the Prophet ﷺ. Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman — they institutionalized the importance of giving and how to give it.” That history is the foundation. The challenge is updating the architecture to meet today’s moment.
The Community Collaboration Initiative
The Community Collaboration Initiative began in 2018 with Dilnaz speaking directly to leaders of Muslim-led nonprofits across the country. She asked them about board diversity, donor transparency, and — most importantly — about collaboration. Who do you work with? How do you partner across Muslim-led organizations and beyond?
What she heard surprised her. Muslim-led nonprofits were doing extraordinary mission-driven work, but most simply didn’t have the bandwidth to have the meaningful conversations with peer executive directors and program leaders that would let them learn from one another.
CCI was designed to fix that. The model: bring twenty-five Muslim-led nonprofits together, one board member and one staff member from each, into a three-year research-based initiative with a structured progression.
- Year One: Collaboration through trust-building. Monthly conversations about how to move from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset.
- Year Two: Collaboration through programming. Participating organizations decide what they want to build together.
- Year Three: Collaboration through sustainability. Opening the conversation outward to the broader foundation and grantmaking world.
The principal investigator was Dr. Shariq Siddiqui of Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. Project management ran through Ruhi Younis and the WF Fund. As Dilnaz put it: “Collaboration is the buzzword right now. But to do it well, we realized three years is the right number. One year is too short to build empathy and trust. Five years is too long. Three years is the sweet spot.”
The Year of Learning
The Year of Learning, which Dilnaz helped convene, was the next leap — a structured, multi-event series designed to bring mainstream American philanthropy into conversation with the American Muslim community. Five conveners shared the work: the Field Foundation (Hilesh Patel), the Illinois Muslim Civic Coalition (Reema Kamran and her colleagues), Indiana University’s Lilly School of Philanthropy, and the WF Fund, with planning partners from the Woods Fund, the Chicago Community Trust, the Institute for Policy and Civic Engagement at the University of Illinois, Interfaith America (then Interfaith Youth Core), Bank of America, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and others.
The inspiration came from outside the Muslim community: a 2019 convening organized by Megan Bang at the Spencer Foundation, which brought together more than 500 philanthropic leaders to learn about Native American communities. Dilnaz and her partners saw a model worth borrowing — relationship-building first, transactions later.
“It can’t be a one-off,” she said on the podcast. “Nothing really gets done in the first conversation. It’s how the second and third and fourth conversation build the nuanced relationship that leads to better outcomes.”
What this builds toward
Two threads tie this work together that feel especially relevant now. The first is mainstream philanthropic engagement: even when community foundations do fund Muslim-led institutions, the funding levels have historically been a fraction of what comparable non-Muslim institutions receive. Closing that gap requires education, relationship-building, and structural change — and it requires Muslim institutions ready to engage when those doors open.
The second is reclaiming the narrative. Dilnaz pushed back gently on the way the American Muslim story is often told. “We don’t need someone else to tell our story,” she said. “We’ve been here for four hundred years. Thirty percent of African Americans came from Muslim heritage. The journey from enslaved individuals to the Nation of Islam to Islam — these are conversations that are not well told.” The Year of Learning was, in part, a project of telling them.
AMCF’s own work — donor-advised funds, endowments, giving circles, the Nonprofit Summit, the Muslim Civil Rights Index Fund — sits inside the same conversation. The trailblazers Dilnaz named on the podcast — the El-Hibri Foundation, Pillars Fund, Proteus Fund, and others — did the foundational work fifteen and twenty years ago. The current generation gets to build on it.
Listen and learn more
You can find the full conversation with Dilnaz Waraich on the Muslim Philanthropy Podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts. To learn more about supporting Muslim philanthropy research and infrastructure through AMCF, visit amuslimcf.org or open a donor-advised fund with us at amuslimcf.org/dafs.
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