#MuslimPhilanthropy Podcast Steve Sosebee on Building HEAL Palestine and Standing With Gaza

#MuslimPhilanthropy Podcast: Salman Hassan on Storytelling, Representation, and Building Kufi Productions

Kufi Productions founder Salman Hassan joins the Muslim Philanthropy Podcast on storytelling, the campus protests that sparked the org, and Muslim representation.

#MuslimPhilanthropy Podcast: The Social Health of Older Muslims: Why Mosques Matter for the Loneliness Epidemic

U-M researchers Kristine Ajrouch and Noah Webster join the Muslim Philanthropy Podcast on Muslim aging research and the social health role of mosques.

#MuslimPhilanthropy Podcast with Trita Parsi of The Quincy Institute

For more than two decades, Trita Parsi has been one of the most persistent advocates for a different kind of American foreign policy — one built on diplomacy and restraint rather than military intervention. He founded the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) to give Iranian Americans a political voice, spent years researching the tangled dynamics of U.S.-Iran-Israel relations, and eventually co-founded the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, one of Washington’s most distinctive and independent think tanks. This week on the Muslim Philanthropy Podcast, AMCF Co-Founder and Chief Development Officer Muhi Khwaja sat down with Trita to talk about the journey, the ideas, and the institution he helped build From Iran to Sweden to Washington Trita was born in Iran in 1974. When he was four and a half years old, his family fled the country just before the revolution — settling in Sweden, where he would spend the next two decades. He studied political science at Uppsala and Stockholm Universities, added a master’s in economics, and eventually made his way to the United States in 2000 to pursue a PhD at Johns Hopkins SAIS, where his dissertation examined Israeli-Iranian relations — a subject so overlooked at the time that the last book written on it had been published in 1988. That research shaped everything that followed. Trita saw how the U.S.-Iran relationship was being distorted by forces most analysts weren’t fully accounting for, and he wanted to build institutions capable of changing the conversation. Building NIAC, then something bigger After graduate school, Trita founded the National Iranian American Council to give the Iranian American community a seat at the table in U.S. foreign policy debates. It was the kind of organizational work that required years of patient institution-building — and it gave him a firsthand education in how Washington actually worked, and where its blind spots were. The signing of the JCPOA — the Iran nuclear deal — felt like a validation of the diplomatic approach he had long championed. But as the Trump administration moved toward withdrawal from the agreement, Trita found himself thinking about a deeper problem: the failure wasn’t just about one deal or one administration. It was about a foreign policy establishment that kept defaulting to militarism even when the evidence argued for something else. Why the Quincy Institute In 2018 and 2019, Trita co-founded the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft alongside a group that included historian and retired Army colonel Andrew Bacevich, researcher Eli Clifton, diplomat Suzanne DiMaggio, and historian Stephen Wertheim. The name was chosen deliberately — a reference to John Quincy Adams’ 1821 speech warning that America should not go abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” The point wasn’t nostalgia. It was a reminder that a different foreign policy tradition had existed before World War II, and that it could exist again. Bacevich, who lost his son in the Iraq War and spent years as one of Washington’s sharpest critics of American military adventurism, became one of the organization’s defining voices. The founding team brought together expertise across regions, policy areas, and ideological backgrounds — with Eli and Stephen both finishing books at the time that would shape the restraint policy conversation in the years ahead. An institution built differently From the beginning, Trita and his colleagues made deliberate choices about how to fund the Quincy Institute. They would not accept money from defense industries. They would not accept money from foreign governments. And they would build bipartisan support — securing funding from both George Soros’s Open Society Institute on the left and Charles Koch’s Institute on the right — not as a gimmick, but as proof that opposition to reflexive militarism wasn’t a partisan position. Today the Quincy Institute operates on a budget of $8–9 million with a staff of 45 to 50 people organized around global regions. It has also built a funding tracker database to promote transparency in think tank funding across Washington — holding the broader industry to a standard of disclosure that Quincy applies to itself. What it’s really about When Muhi asked Trita to describe the core of what the Quincy Institute is trying to do, his answer was straightforward: shift the paradigm. Not win a single debate or influence a single policy decision, but change what Washington thinks is possible — and remind Americans that the country has other traditions to draw on besides the one that produced the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “We’re not just trying to tweak the existing foreign policy,” he said. “We’re trying to change the framework itself.” You can learn more about the Quincy Institute at quincy-institute.org. Listen to the full conversation on the Muslim Philanthropy Podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts. The post #MuslimPhilanthropy Podcast with Trita Parsi of The Quincy Institute [https://amuslimcf.org/muslimphilanthropy-podcast-with-trita-parsi-of-the-quincy-institute/] appeared first on American Muslim Community Foundation [https://amuslimcf.org].

#MuslimPhilanthropy Podcast Steve Sosebee on Building HEAL Palestine and Standing With Gaza

For more than three decades, Steve Sosebee has been one of the most consistent humanitarian voices for Palestinian children. He founded the Palestine Children's Relief Fund (PCRF) in 1991 and led it for thirty years. At the end of 2023, in the months following October 7, he made what he called the hardest decision of his life — he left the organization he had built and started over from zero. On January 1, 2024, he co-founded HEAL Palestine. In this episode of the Muslim Philanthropy Podcast, AMCF Co-Founder and Chief Development Officer Muhi Khwaja sits down with Steve to talk about the journey that brought him from a small college town in Ohio to founding two of the most active humanitarian organizations working in Palestine, the four pillars HEAL is built on, and what genuine support for Gaza looks like right now. We also get into the operational realities of running an international NGO, the lessons Steve learned the hard way at PCRF, his advice for first-time nonprofit founders, and what he tells people who feel hopeless watching from a distance.

#MuslimPhilanthropy Podcast with Mohamed Barkhad of Retain Quran Foundation

Mohamed Barkhad spent six and a half years at Cisco Systems and now nearly six years at Google as a cloud architect. But the work he's most proud of is an app: Retain Quran, which has reached more than 1.3 million downloads across 120 countries with multi-language support in twelve languages. In this episode of the Muslim Philanthropy Podcast, AMCF Co-Founder and Chief Development Officer Muhi Khwaja sits down with Mohamed — co-founder and chairman of Retain Quran Foundation — to unpack how the app started, what makes it different from the hundreds of other Quran apps in the market, why his wife is the reason it exists, and what the team is raising $300,000 to build next. We also get into the team behind the app, Mohamed's advice for first-time founders, the hadith that drives him, and his vision for reaching 100 million users globally.