The Pillars Fund first started in Chicago nine years ago, when a handful of successful American Muslims pooled their resources together and began to help fund nonprofit Muslim groups in America. BuzzFeed reports that today the fund is “emerging as a powerful, behind-the-scenes engine of Muslim activism, a secret weapon in the war against the multimillion-dollar Islamophobia industry.”
The organization started as a donor-advised fund with the clear aim to not only support service organizations in the Muslim American community, but, according to the New York Times, “they also wanted to help groups working to change the narrative of Muslims and present a more diverse view of the community than extremists and Hollywood generally portray. Doing this in an age of social media, with its easy engagement and rapid dissemination of news, presents an opportunity that benevolent societies of the past did not have: promoting positive portrayals while also responding to negative ones in real time.”
Anas Osman, a founding trustee of the Pillars Fund, said he was raised to give back. His parents hailed from Syria and helped build the mosque in the Chicago suburb where they lived. He says the goal of him and his co-founders is to give to more to increase visibility for Muslims and through that “to ultimately humanize American Muslims and underscore the breadth of what American Muslim means — as opposed to a very narrow definition.”
