The Global Muslim Futures Impact Fund
Still from the forthcoming (Dec. 2021) Ms. Marvel Disney+ television series staring Iman Vellani
Over the last year, we have explored unique aspects of Global Muslim Life focused on social impact, spiritual impact, and narrative change through our Global Muslim Social & Spiritual Impact forum, through our digital media academy, and with the Global Muslim Film festival. We have also started important conversations about the future of Muslim life around the world.
After the inaugural year of our center in 2020, we started asking a difficult question internally, how would we move beyond just researching and writing about global Muslim social and spiritual impact and actually create impact ourselves? Over the last few years, we have been a part of unique impact investing ecosystems in Northern & Southern California, while also exploring emerging impact investing ecosystems in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. With partnerships with Catalyst San Diego, we were part of unique impact investing tables focused on Immigrant rights and impact investing which included organizations ranging from the California governor’s office of social innovation to the CEO of GoFundMe.
We have learned from Mission Driven Finance’s set of recent funds designed with Islamic financing options available first with Somali Family Services, and now focused more broadly on immigrants and refugees with their people on the move fund that they created with the faith-based funder, Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart. We have also learned immensely from our partnership with the American Muslim Community Foundation, as our fiscal sponsorship, as they build an ecosystem of Muslim-led donor-advised funds.
The key difference in these spaces, beyond traditional philanthropic networks, was that they are combining access to capital focused on underrepresented communities, and social impact issues, not just in the non-profit sector, but also with for-profit businesses setting up Islamically compliant debt and equity investment structures. According to the Global Impact Investing Network, there is
Approximately $715 billion dollars currently invested in impact assets
Across more than 1720 organizations
While there are many impact-oriented philanthropic funds targeting Muslim communities in the United States, and there have been several attempts at Muslim-focused venture capital funds globally, we have not seen a mixed impact investing model like the one we are proposing here.
In thinking about what a Muslim-focused impact investment fund would look like, we have turned to our favorite book on the nascent field, Umar Mughal’s groundbreaking work, A Socially Responsible Islamic Finance: Character and the Common Good. In his attempt to explore how Islamic spirituality and ethics should impact our lives related to finance and a just system of capital, he reflects on how impact investing and Islamic finance can learn from each other, “Impact markets have set important precedents for Islamic finance and Muslim economies to consider by partnering with social and environmental initiatives and creating mechanisms to protect against mission loss. Impact investing itself involves a collaboration among risk, capital, and public benefit, which may be mirrored in concept by Muslim communities through the well-established vehicle of waqf (pl. awqaf) under Islamic law, which finds parallel in many contemporary systems of trusts and endowments, and through non-profit or public service organizations.”
In building our first Muslim-focused impact investment fund, we are starting with what we know best, with a fund focussed on Muslims in the United States, though we would love to build global and regional funds like our friends at 500 Startups in the future. The fund itself will be focused on the three areas of our core expertise:
Muslim Social Impact
Muslim Spiritual Impact and
Muslim Narrative Impact Projects
Film
Television
Digital narrative change projects
In discussing issues of impact investing in the Muslim community we understand this has to do not only with the type of projects we are supporting but also the type of founders we are looking to support. The primary roadblock for so many highly motivated founders looking to serve the community has to do with access to networks, access to mentorship, and primarily, access to working capital, and seed funding to launch projects. Even within crowdfunding within the Muslim community where many people turn for baselines of seed funding and product testing, seed capital can be very difficult to raise for startups, films, and the arts more broadly.
These are some of the identity considerations we will be looking to support with this fund:
Muslim founder(s) or Muslim focused projects
Working-class without access to capital
Ethically rooted businesses
Ethically rooted nonprofits
New Americans, immigrants, asylum seekers, undocumented
African Americans
American Indians
Female founders
Formerly incarcerated
Converts
In preparing to launch this fund we have reflected deeply on our own track record in researching and analyzing global Muslim companies, nonprofits, and films with our Global Muslim Startups reports in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2020, and the 2020 Global Muslim Film Festival. Of course, we have also written about and spoken at conferences with our partners at 500 Startups about the larger Muslims in Tech ecosystem which we have outlined as follows:
Muslim Social & Spiritual Impact (where this fund is focused)
Muslims in Global Tech Ecosystems
US
Southeast Asia
Africa
The Middle East / Turkey
Europe
Companies focused on Muslim majority populations
Muslim startups focused on Muslim consumers (where our research has focused)
Faith, philanthropy & venture capital, and impact investing
Diversity, equity, and belonging in the corporate space
Through our research and analysis, we identified 175 companies that we followed over the years starting in 2015, at a time when global Muslim startups were just starting to grow. Since that time,
In total at least 41 of these companies raised in excess of $193 million dollars in venture capital, and philanthropic investments. On a somewhat surprising note, more than 50% of these companies are based in the United States.
Almost all of the 37 non-profits we featured in the articles are still in existence and have raised tens of millions of dollars
There have been at least 5 merger and acquisitions deals that we are aware of and
At least six of the companies featured were accepted into top tech and nonprofit accelerator programs like Y Combinator and New Media Ventures
The scope of this market far exceeds the research we have done to date as we will show in our 2021 Global Muslim Tech & Futures Conference later this year. This is made clear in the recent Dinar Standard, Islamic FinTech report which predicts the Islamic FinTech space alone to be worth $128 billion alone by 2025, with Islamic FInTechs like Wahed Invest and Insha growing in Western markets rapidly. This is of course far eclipsed by the billions of dollars in money raised to build hundreds of companies, with billions of dollars in tech exits, by Muslims working more broadly in tech just in the United States.
The Muslim impact fund will be unique as a Muslim focused impact investment fund, using Islamic financing structures with funding available for both for-profit and non-profit social impact-focused projects, but the final area we are focused on, narrative impact is rarely included in impact investment funds beyond Hollywood. With the growth of companies like Ava Duvernay’s production house Array Studios, Jeff Skoll’s Participant Media, and Charles D. King’s production and film investment fund Macro, it is clear social impact and narrative change rooted storytelling is making hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office and with global streaming platforms.
With the launch of the Global Muslim Film & Television Festival, we see clearly the opportunity for us to work in this space.
In the first year of the festival, we had several streaming platforms reach out to us for introductions to filmmakers featured in our programming.
With films we featured in the festival now streaming on - Netflix, TRT, Al Jazeera, PBS, DIsney+, Amazon Prime, and Alchemiya.