AMCLI Through the Years – Founders’ Reflection

The American Muslim Civic Leadership Institute (AMCLI) emerged out of a research project and a convening of civic leaders in 2006. Fifteen years after its inception, the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture sat down with AMCLI founders Nadia Roumani and Brie Loskota to hear about how it began. As the two founders move on to new ventures, this interview serves as a repository of many of the lessons they have learned along the way.

AMCLI Then and Now

What has changed about the American Muslim landscape since AMCLI started in 2006?

The conversation has been edited for clarity. You can navigate the conversation through the questions in the menu. It covers:

• AMCLI’s Origin
• Fears and Allies
• Difficult Conversations
• Religion
• Signature Practices
• Gratitude

Nadia Roumani is the co-founder and senior designer of the Designing for Social Systems program at Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school). The daughter of Syrian immigrants, she grew up in a vibrant American Muslim community in Los Angeles that was grounded in social justice and influenced her life’s work.

Brie Loskota was the executive director of the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture, which houses AMCLI, and the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School. She is not Muslim; rather, she was born in the Philippines into a Pentecostal Christian family. Her family’s experience in the Philippines taught her the value of being kind to strangers in a strange land. After graduating from USC, she earned a Master’s degree from Hebrew Union College, where she first connected with American Muslim civic leaders.

What needs were you seeking to address with AMCLI?

Brie: Nadia and I met through a project at the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture about congregations that were successfully connecting with Twentysomethings. We were both hired as independent researchers on the project. I decided that we were going to become friends and she eventually bought into that plan. The project resulted in a chapter called “Congregations that Get It” in the book Passing on the Faith: Transforming Traditions for the Next Generation of Jews, Christians and Muslims.

In talking to young people about their congregations, and young Muslims about their identities, we heard a lot of hurt. There was a lot of alienation. People felt like they didn’t have a spiritual home, and they were being pressured and pressed.

It was a few years after September 11th and in the wake of the Bush administration’s first term, moving into the second term. It was a really tough environment to be in for a lot of young Muslim leaders, especially those who were working in organizations that were fairly new. There was a deeply felt sense of pain.

I joined the staff of CRCC in, I think, September 2004. Then, CRCC started the Passing The Mantle program with the Rev. Dr. Cecil L. Murray in order to help the next generation of Black Church leaders embrace the important social and economic roles that their congregations could play in their community. At CRCC, we were thinking about how you build capacity for people to live their life’s missions in ways that are sustainable.

From my experience with the Jewish community, I knew there’s a whole infrastructure to support leadership and institutions and innovation and tradition. And I think for us, all of those things coalesced.

Then, there was this moment when a mutual friend of ours, Edina Lekovic, came home from working at the Muslim Public Affairs Council and just collapsed in exhaustion and burnout and sadness and desperation and just needing a break. A few friends, including Nadia and myself, had gathered at Edina’s house before going to dinner. We looked at each other and thought, this doesn’t need to be like this.

Edina wasn’t unique: It was a story repeated over and over and over again.

To use up leadership in this way and use up that potential is a choice. It might be a choice being made passively, but it is actually a set of choices, and we can make different choices. We can put our energy into doing something so that it didn’t suck to be a young Muslim leader in an organization, and you didn’t have to see every moment of your time sucked up into these firefights and every amount of energy exhausted to do things that were like climbing up a sand hill.

Edina calls herself AMCLI’s patient zero, because we were really in many ways solving for the type of pain that we had witnessed that she was going through.

Nadia: I’ll just add that at that time, there were a lot of new organizations starting and a recognition that there needed to be new voices. So you had this generation that had been catapulted into leadership, but nobody had actually invested in training them to be in those roles.

I remember when we went into the Jewish and Christian communities and saw the infrastructure that was there and saw how they were supported and nurtured and moved through stages rather than just put in a limelight and expected to both defend the community externally and also lead internally with no support.

It seemed like there were models out there of what it looked like to build a more empowered, resilient capacity of this leadership. It didn’t seem like rocket science to build that, but it did seem like there was a vacuum for us in which to do that. And especially after hearing all those stories, it felt unethical or strange to just be like, “Thanks for sharing. Sorry you’re sitting in all that pain.”

It felt like we had to do something to respond to that gap.

Brie: And you have to remember the era of this is pre-social media. People were not talking a lot about developing networks of support. So it was not easy for people to build community; it was not easy for people to be visible to each other. There was a tremendous sense, not just of the burnout and despair, but also of isolation.

I think the isolation was the biggest thing that we could help solve–to give people a sense that you are not alone; it is not all on you. There are other people. We met so many incredible people who were really good at what they were doing or with the potential to be great at what they were doing. And they were invisible to each other.

Along with Edina and Sumaya Abubaker, who would become program manager of AMCLI, you two hosted 22 civic leaders from diverse American Muslim communities for a meeting in 2006. What were the goals of that initial meeting?

Nadia: We knew there were needs to be addressed, but we didn’t know exactly what we were designing. We didn’t know if this was a book project, a collection of stories or a speaker’s bureau. But the one thing we did know was that the way in which American Muslim leaders were being convened wasn’t responding to the community’s actual needs. We didn’t see this community being convened by and of itself.

We wanted to change that dynamic–to bring people together without a set agenda to talk about what the needs were in a neutral place. So that was the drive to host the first meeting in 2006.

The Rockefeller Brothers Fund Pocantico Conference Center in New York allowed us to use their space.

We flipped the script a little bit and said, “There is no organizing body for this group.” I think it was important to shift the dynamic so that the group coming together wasn’t reacting to somebody else’s agenda, but could actually articulate the needs that the group wanted for itself, and then talk through how we would get there.

When we sent out the first round of invitations, I was thinking, “Is anyone going to say yes?” I am not a person of religious leadership in the community, and Brie is new to the Muslim community. So they didn’t necessarily know who we were, except for Edina.

Brie: Edina had the social capital. She was one of the very few figures that were visible nationally and connected to a Muslim organization. But I’m not even Muslim. I was like, “Are they going to accept me in this space? Or will it be an intrusion?”

Nadia: And then, people started to say, “Yes.”

We thought, “We really are responding to a need.”

Brie: Everybody was hungry. They were just hungry for the space as Nadia was talking about it, which was a space where they were able to talk openly and freely about what they wished that they had had up until that moment and what they wished they could have the next day. And what they wished for the people who were coming after them.

It was an incredible conversation. And what came out of it after that weekend were—one, some really great friendships—but also three areas that were identified. First, Muslims were getting kind of overrun in the media, and there was no way for media folks to find the people really doing the work because they were always too busy, and the ones who were raising their hands to catch the media’s attention didn’t have their hands busy doing the work. So they were getting misrepresented by opportunists in the media. Second, there was no philanthropic infrastructure to support Muslim communities. And, third, there was no leadership pipeline or way to invest in Muslim leaders over the long term.

And what’s happened now is that on all three of those challenges, there has been a lot of movement. In the last 15 years, there’s been a tremendous amount of Muslim engagement around the media. There’s been all sorts of philanthropic endeavors related to it, both in non-Muslim philanthropy and in Muslim philanthropy—mostly run by AMCLI fellows. And then we’ve been doing AMCLI since 2008.

How was AMCLI affected by Islamophobia in the post-9/11 environment?

Nadia: After we started to build the program, when we sought funding, a lot of national foundations and institutions weren’t funding mainstream Muslim organizations. The big question I had was, “Are they willing to fund Muslim initiatives?”

At that time, there was a lot of attacking of organizations that were doing anything Muslim-related. My question was really, “Are these organizations going to succumb to the fear and Islamophobia? Or are they really ready to invest in the next generation of Muslim leadership?”

Brie: That is 100% true.

I also think that I was afraid. There was so much Islamophobia at the time. I was worried, one, that we would take a lot of hits for it. And, two, that we’d be creating the hit-list for people to go after. So in raising the visibility of folks, we’re also creating a greater liability for them in terms of what they face.

Nadia: There was also the fear of the personal character assassinations that were happening. If anyone did speak out, there was a whole group of anti-Muslim organizations and people that would come at you and find ways to do 30 degrees of separation from some sort of terrorist activity. You were just waiting for these people to come and try to undermine your character. That was something I know I really was worried about and very conscious of.

I knew why members of the Muslim community would go out on a limb. I think for me, it was the shock that people not connected to the community—that Brie and CRCC—would go out on a limb and be willing to make herself and that organization vulnerable to some extent. You would think it shouldn’t be making people or organizations vulnerable, just to do a basic leadership program, but in the context, it was. That willingness to stand by the community—because it was the right thing to do, and it was part of the belief in a pluralistic society— was something I’ll always remember and respect, and honor.

And then we had people like Stosh Cotler of Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, who stepped up in an overwhelming way. When we were designing the program, I remember Stosh telling us about a program that they had built for Jewish civic leaders across the country. She handed over her binder of her curriculum and said, “If anything’s helpful, feel free to adapt it.” It definitely informed a lot of our activities and our framing. 

That was an interesting way to start a Muslim program, with a leader of a Jewish organization kind of leading us in that process.

I think it also demonstrated to others that there are people who are invested in building the Muslim community that come from other communities. To be able to experience that was another one of those moments where I was in awe of how much people are willing to share without being proprietary about what they had built, so that others could build similar or parallel programs. That was really powerful.

American Muslims are not one unified community. How did AMCLI deal with diverging perspectives and expectations among participants?

Nadia: I would say the moments that were scariest to me were when something came up that was a lightning rod in the community. Almost each year we had a different, big issue. 

Each time I remember the fear that diving into it may actually break the program. The intensity and the emotions around the issue could end up making people walk away.

But each time, we chose to engage and dive in because of the belief that we can’t keep walking past these issues without addressing them, and addressing them is actually about building communities. 

One year we had a big conversation where something happened that triggered a lot of emotions that broke down along a gender line. And rather than continue with the rest of our program as is, we needed to collectively address it. That meant naming it, creating the space to have the conversation, making sure everybody was heard and trying not to expect closure, because these are decade-, century-long challenges and tensions.

We said, “We as a community are going to wrestle with this. It’s going to be messy; there are going to be a lot of emotions. But hopefully in the end everybody will have a little more insight into why that was so triggering, and figure out how we can just make it better moving forward, whatever better looks like for this community.”

I think as a community we ended up better for it. We learned how to engage in uncomfortable conversations. It’s still a long way to go, but I think one of the things I am most proud of is just how we are able to do that, even though it wasn’t always perfect. But I think we tried to really move in that direction.

Brie: We are as a group, as a culture, out of practice with the habits of what it takes to be together. And we’re out of the habits of what it takes to sustain relationships. 

Every relationship has problems. We have disagreements because we’re fundamentally different people. If the only thing that you can stomach are people that are like you—and what’s interesting is they may not be like you in terms of skin color or gender, though they may be like you in terms of ideology or language—if that’s the only thing that we find acceptable, then we really narrow our sphere of influence.

How do we be okay with who we are and maintain relationships that can be a productive place where we grapple with those tensions, even if they don’t get resolved?

That’s a fundamental human practice, and one that we are sorely out of practice about doing. We don’t have the places where we engage with that. And when we do, it’s often in a very “scoring points” sort of way. It’s about being wounded and then wounding others rather than getting to understanding. I’ve remained to this day, a deep believer in the importance of dialogue.

Nadia: To give a concrete example of that, I remember there was a time when somebody in the group wanted to end every session with a duat, with a prayer. And then all of a sudden, some other people in our group were like, “I didn’t sign up for that. I don’t want to end every session with a prayer.” Right there in that moment, you saw very different interpretations of what it meant to be in community with each other and the rituals that go along with that.

We had a chance to have a moment to talk that out and see what everyone wanted and what they were comfortable with. And I think our resolution to it was an example of making sure we can stay in community and dialogue, but also allow people to practice in their own way.

We said everybody in the room has to be afforded a choice. Nothing should feel compulsory. There needs to be an intentional pause where somebody doesn’t feel judged if they don’t stay. There’s a formal end to the session. Then those who want to then continue and close in a duat need to migrate to another space in the room. And they collectively can close in a duat.

It created a more intentional way to make sure everybody was comfortable and still in community with one another. That’s a tiny example of how we definitely have norms and ways of working, but we had to come up with new ways of being together, depending on each group. How do we make sure that everyone feels like they can be in community and dialogue without their own ways of being in the world getting trampled upon or, or forcibly swayed one way or another?

What did it mean to you for AMCLI to be a “Muslim” leadership program?

Brie: AMCLI is an educational program in the context of a non-sectarian university. It is not a religious training program, but a leadership program that is rooted in a certain way of understanding Muslimness and Islam in this context. It’s a very delicate dance.

When we started AMCLI, there were certainly concerns about how religious we were. Were we religious enough? Were we religious in the right ways? Were we imposing religion on people? Were we making space for all the different ways for people to practice? Every year, we tried to recalibrate and adjust to find the right approach.

At the beginning, we didn’t have a lot of credibility to lean on, just a lot of goodwill. So we made adjustment after adjustment after adjustment. And then finally I think we started to settle into our skin. Which was, “This is who we are, and it’s not going to be for everybody, and everybody’s not always going to be comfortable. And we will try to make it as comfortable as it can be for you, but there’s consent in opting into any relationship.”

Nadia:  Just building off of that, it was interesting that the process of settling into our skin was really important. Because at the beginning it was a big question about how do you engage a religious community while not having religious authority? 

We did things like text studies. I’ll never forget that. Trying to facilitate a text study was probably one of my most nervous moments of teaching or facilitating ever! Usually the person who facilitates that conversation is a person with the most religious knowledge, the person who has a strong grasp of the Quran and recitation. And that definitely was not the role that I had in that group.

Over time, it became clear that we can engage a diverse religious community without having that religious authority. Because what we became really clear on is that our expertise was in holding space for a diverse religious community to have a healthy relationship and dialogue with itself.

Our goal wasn’t to be the most religious person in the room or have all the answers. Our goal was to make sure, as much as we possibly can, that everybody in that room feels safe to share their own experience, their own truth in a way that shows the diversity of American Muslims. And that leads to a healthy conversation about what is happening across the country, and what American Muslims need, and what the community wants to move forward.

I think we became experts in that: how to create that space and how to hold it; how to build the container and make sure that you could have people in the room from very secular to very religious. And that became something that we did have credibility and authority and knowledge in. 

Brie: I think the question of how we handled religion was always such an evolving source of contention and difficulty, but then also sometimes real creativity. I actually think what we did really well wasn’t necessarily the process, like the thing that we decided on; it was telling people about the choices that we had to make.

I remember initially our schedule didn’t have prayer times on it. And then somebody was like, “Is this a secular program? Where’s the Muslim-ness?”

So then we added the prayer times, and somebody said, “This is so overbearing. We know when prayer times are, why would you add them?”

So we added the prayer times with “for those who are observing.” And then someone else was like, “How could you put that it’s for those who are observing? Shouldn’t everybody be observing?”

I can’t remember what we decided to do, but in future programs, we told them the story of each of the options. And for me, that was powerful because everybody thought that there was some politics behind the decision. Really the intention was to create an opportunity for people who want to pray to pray and for everyone to feel like AMCLI is a welcoming place for them. Rather than trying to solve it with the perfect process, we talked to people through it.

When we made a decision, it was because a decision had to be made, not necessarily because we’d had this overriding agenda with it. We were very clear about our intentions and the limitations of the choices we had to work with.

I really liked the conversation that we would have at the beginning of the program, where we were like, “Let’s talk about religion. Here’s how we handle religion. And it looks like this, and you might find that upsetting, and we don’t want you to find it upsetting. And so we will make modifications to have it be less upsetting, but anytime we make a choice, someone will interpret that choice in whatever ways. We can’t be responsible for it, but we will tell you what our intention is behind it.”

And, for the most part, that defused a lot of mostly minor conflicts for people. Give people some insight into your process, give them some insight into the limitations that you have and ask them to extend you some grace, and then offer to do the same for them.

Nadia: I think how we landed on faith reflections is another really good model of that. People wanted us to infuse the program with a sense of Muslim identity, faith and spirituality. We started with scholars presenting. We tried to get a range of scholars. But no matter who we brought, people in the group would say, “Why don’t you bring this person too?” Or they would be upset by the way one scholar spoke.

We realized quickly that that was not going to be an effective solution. If the goal was to infuse the group with spirituality, then we decided to imbue the space with the group’s own reflections. We asked the group to bring their own lived faith—the way they practiced their faith—into the group and share that as a way to bring faith into the space. 

I really am happy with where that landed because it ended up reflecting the group and reflecting the American Muslim community’s perspective on how faith is coming into their lives. 

What are some of the unique ways that AMCLI approaches leadership development?  

Nadia:  One practice I think is really cool is AMCLI’s practice of not having people introduce themselves with their organizational hat. It took away the transactional, organizational element of the program. 

Everyone introduces themselves to each other as full people—who they are, what they care about, where they come from, what they want in the world. Their organizational affiliation comes out later in different sessions.

Often when we convene people, the first thing that’s asked is who are you, and what’s your title, and what organization are you representing? 

Connecting person-to-person sets a different foundation for what it means to be in relationship or in community with one another.

Brie:  The idea of treating people like they’re full humans is important to AMCLI’s approach. Even though this is a network, it’s also hopefully a deeply embedded set of relationships, and at the best they’re friendships. 

Networks can also be transactional, and I’m really happy that people now use the AMCLI network to get a resource or job, but underneath the ability to transact—or maybe holding the ability to transact—is a relational container that’s deeper than what you can do for me and what I can do for you. 

People aren’t assets to be managed or extracted. They’re hopefully people you’re in relationship with, and sometimes your closest friends and confidants. That comes from making people meet on a human level and then realizing how incredible they are.

The other component of all this is we tried to make AMCLI fun. We laugh. I always tried to be the goofiest. But I think that we tried to make participation in AMCLI something that was joyful because there was so much seriousness in the whole enterprise. If it couldn’t be joyful, it would just be another source of burnout. 

So how do we get people to enjoy learning, enjoy building relationships and enjoy the prospect of changing themselves in a way that doesn’t make it feel like just another task?

Nadia:  Yeah. I think we were intentional about not just having joy with one event—we definitely have game night—but also integrating joy throughout the day to give people a reprieve. We’re going to tackle some serious issues, but we don’t have to do that at the expense of bringing joy back into the work.

I also think it is helpful to raise the practice of having people reflect and learn from each other rather than through formal lectures. Our curriculum being experiential—and especially rooted in discussion and dialogue—was a very big shift from the traditional educational approach that most people were expecting.

What we learned is that we need to be the container and give the principles and the values, but actually having people walk through the work in partnership and wrestle with it together takes them much farther and allows them to grow and build both capacity and community better. Because if you give people the right structure to provide healthy feedback, they can be their own peer coaches and teachers. We don’t have that many mentors in this space.

Brie: It’s adult education and learning principles. I think we stumbled into it and then learned the pedagogic theory. This conversation leads me to think about a turning point for how we ran AMCLI programs—when Marshall Ganz, a professor of leadership at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, called us chicken shits.

I came from a school of facilitation that said that the facilitator is not part of the conversation. That the facilitator’s job was to be almost therapeutic. The therapist is not part of the story. Your facilitator is not part of the conversation.

Marshall Ganz had come to be a trainer at AMCLI. We were on a break and we were talking, almost bragging about how well we had created this opportunity for the participants, but not for us. And he said, “That sounds really like chicken shit…”—that we were doing that as a form of self-protection rather than as facilitation.

So we started to experiment with modeling, doing the things that we’re asking other people to do, which is an adult education principle.

I remember one time I got feedback that I was aloof. I thought I was so warm! But I didn’t know that I had permission to be myself in the group. It was nice to be more fully ourselves in the group for people because it creates a lot of permission. It creates permission on game night to be goofy. It creates permission when you’re sharing something difficult for other people to do the same thing.

It says “I’m not going to take you someplace I’m unwilling to go.”

Nadia: One more practice that I’m thinking of is that we tried a lot of things and were not wedded to them. We would try things once and see if it worked, and if it worked, we’d keep building it in. And some stuff we tried didn’t necessarily hit the mark and we took it out. 

We were really designing for the moment and the community.

“One unique element of AMCLI is expressing gratitude for everybody–not just the trainers, but to the group itself. Everybody who participates has a role in building the experience for each other. We’re not giving them a gift of this training; they’re creating the space for us.

When they create this magic with us, we thank them for their contributions to it.”

Brie Loskota, AMCLI co-founder

Thank you to all fellows who have donated to AMCLI in honor of Nadia Roumani and Brie Loskota. Click here if you would like to contribute to support AMCLI.

1. Aamina Ahmed
2. Adeel Zeb
3. Amelah El- Amin
4. Amina Mahmood
5. Arshia Ali-Khan
6. Arshia Wajid
7. Asim Rehman
8. Asra Ali
9. Atif Moon
10. Azhar Mithaiwala
11. Aziza Hasan
12. Deana Helmy
13. Dilnaz Waraich
14. Edina Lekovic
15. Faisal Qazi
16. Faseeha Altaf
17. Ghada Khan
18. Hala Mohammad
19. Hazel Gomez
20. Jenan Mohajir
21. Kaamileh Hamid & Fayez Kazi
22. Karim Hakim
23. Khizer Husain
24. Khulood Madany
25. Komal Rasheed
26. Marium Mohiuddin
27. Milia Islam-Majeed
28. Muhi Khwaja
29. Muna Hussaini
30. Noreen Rahman
31. Osama Abdul-Salaam
32. Palmer Shepherd
33. Quaiser Abdullah
34. Razi Hashmi
35. Reema Ahmad
36. Reema Kamran
37. Roohi Younus
38. Saaliha Khan
39. Sabina Mohyuddin
40. Sadia Tirmizi
41. Saira Toor
42. Samira Jaweed
43. Sarah Jawaid
44. Sarah Kalimullah
45. Sarah Sayeed
46. Sehrish Siddiqui
47. Shahed Amanullah
48. Sharaf Mowjood
49. Somayeh Nikooei
50. Suroor Raziuddin
51. Taha Gaya
52. Tannaz Haddadi
53. Tawfiq Farraj
54. Umar Hakim-Dey
55. Yasmin Ali
56. Zeba Iqbal