The Pacific Northwest Muslim Impact Project
Mapping Global Muslim Impact City by City
Since the founding of the Center for Global Muslim Life in 2020 we have been building toward this big idea of mapping the 100 cities of global Muslim impact. In our time when we see all the problems of the nation-state, we can see clearly that impact is best measured, and power is most effectively moved through cities. We will be publishing our full list of these 100 cities later this year, but to launch something this big we have to first test it and pilot it on a much smaller scale.
This past summer we moved to Seattle which has been the fastest growing city in the United States over the last five years. Starting this Ramadan we are going to initiate our public work in Seattle for the Center for Global Muslim Life through a series of workshops, events, and publishing for the Seattle Muslim Impact project. Our goal is for this work to reach throughout the Cascadia corridor from Portland, to Seattle, and across the Canadian border in Vancouver.
At the core of this work in narrative change is changing the story our community is telling about ourselves both internally and externally to lead towards building ecosystems for power building. We are looking for partners in this work, and lead donors to put further seed funding into these projects, and we are actively working on and have submitted a set of grants for these projects. The work that is ahead of us can only be built through coalitions and movement building, it will not be enough for us to lead with only our individual organizations.
Seattle, as one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States over the last five years has experienced rapid change and the growth of Muslim communities in this region, and this growth and transformation has not been explored in depth before.
We are launching seven key projects in the region:
We are working on a national report on the state of the field of Muslim organizing and all the rapid response work being built across the US. This report will include several key case studies showing how Muslims have built power, with one of the key examples being the Muslim Coalition of Minnesota. One of the key conclusions of this report will look at how this model can be replicated in places like Seattle.
We are preparing to launch our 2024 edition of 100 Global Muslim Startups list for 2024 the week of March 1st at MAPS Seattle. As part of this edition of the Global Muslim Startups list we are featuring 20 companies from Seattle who have been named to the list over the years in a discussion around building the Muslim community's economic power.
We have been working on a workshop on the Future of Global Muslim Life, addressing the current situation we are living in and possibilities for power building. This workshop will feature the PNW Prayer rug project that we partnered with Wasat on, and I will begin conducting these workshops in Seattle in the coming months. This workshop will also include a training on public narrative in how we tell our stories in public as so many Muslims are doing right now in response to genocide in Gaza at city halls and local school district meetings.
Mapping Muslim Impact digital map launching before Ramadan. You can preview an early version of it here where we collated Masajid, Musalas, Muslim-owned businesses, Muslim wellness resources, Islamic schools and daycares. Part of this will also be looking at the key areas in the region where there is a lack of access to public prayer spaces. Prayer access here will be seen as a barometer to full belonging for Muslim communities living in these cities we are researching.
Building on more than six months of research, we are writing the Seattle Muslim Impact report examining key ways Muslims are impacting this region through politics, business, technology, as refugees, through arts and culture, spirituality, and sport. We will be writing several case studies as part of the report about opportunities for power building in Seattle as well as emergent organizations and business models unique to Seattle.
During Ramadan 2024 we will launch the early results of this research at our first Seattle Iftar at Seattle City Hall. This event will be a unique public iftar with key Muslim leaders, and leaders from throughout Seattle’s political and philanthropic communities.
In the late spring and early summer we will host several youth summits in Seattle and Vancouver with the hopes of building toward a year-long cohort-based youth leadership program that we will be launching with Ahsen Youth in the summer of 2025.
