“It’s so important for communities of color to have these tools because we’re so often the ones on the frontlines.”
2016 Kairos Fellow Mohammad Khan of MPower Change shares how digital tools are building the grassroots power of Muslims in America to challenge Islamophobia and organize communities.
Before he became a Kairos Fellow, Mohammad Khan was in the field, collaborating with Muslim communities in New York City on civic engagement issues and working for various electoral and issue campaigns.
He applied for the Kairos Fellowship because, as he put it, “I really wanted to develop my digital organizing skills further, especially after seeing how effectively movement work has been pushed on the digital side,” referencing both the #Not1More anti-deportation campaign as well as the savvy of the Movement for Black Lives as inspirations. “And in the campaigns I was working on, I saw how the digital work really complemented and amplified the work done in the field.”
Khan was the first staff person at MPower Change, a relatively new online advocacy organization whose mission is to build the grassroots power of Muslims in America while advancing social, spiritual, racial, and economic justice for all people. At the organization, which only has a small staff, he works on everything from strategy development, to the drafting of emails and the creation of social media assets, to coalition building.
One of the first campaigns he worked on was focused on Southwest Airlines, after a series of Islamophobic incidents in which Arab and Muslim passengers were kicked off of Southwest flights.
Khan has been leading the still-ongoing campaign, which is calling for the airline to both issue public apologies to the two Muslim Americans targeted in those incidents as well as review its internal policies and implement anti-bias training for its flight crews. The campaign has included a petition that received more than 22,000 signatures, an open letter signed by some of the most prominent Muslim organizations in the country as well as allies, and a social media campaign targeting the Southwest CEO Gary Kelly.
“Digital tools allowed us to quickly respond to the incidents on Southwest and mobilize tens of thousands of our members,” Khan said. “We were able to take the sentiment that many people were feeling — that Southwest had acted in a discriminatory manner — and consolidate it, then bring that message to the airline rapidly and over a number of channels.”
Interested in becoming a 2017 Kairos Fellow? Learn more and apply here: kairosfellows.org.
Given the rising arc of Islamophobia in our country that’s been spurred on during this election season, Khan and MPower Change have also been leading a get-out-the-vote effort targeting young Muslim Americans. They partnered with MSA National, the umbrella organization of campus-based Muslim Student Associations, to launch the non-partisan #MyMuslimVote campaign, which includes an online pledge to vote as well as a voter registration tool.
“A lot of the advocacy and civic engagement space tends to be dominated by folks from the older generation,” Khan explained. “We wanted to create a space for millennial Muslims to participate in this work as well, especially after seeing how active young Muslims were in the presidential primaries. We wanted to capture some of that energy and get younger folks involved in a campaign where they could be aspirational and talk about what they were voting for, rather than always being forced to talk about being against things like terrorism and Islamophobia.”
The #MyMuslimVote campaign has also focused on offline tactics, which has included working with MSAs as well as mosques and Muslim American community groups around the country to hold events with the goal of getting people to talk about the election and to pledge to vote.
He pointed out that for some immigrant Muslim communities, merging online and offline tactics is key. “For them, the digital-only theory of change is harder to accept,” he said. “Digital organizing is a set of tools and one set of tactics, and every strategy for change needs to implement a variety of tactics. Digital is one of them, but you still need to do work on the ground and in the field.”
For Khan, it’s critical for communities of color to have the resources and tools to engage in online advocacy. “I loved Kairos’ mission of promoting racial equity in the digital field,” he said. “It’s so important for communities of color to have these tools because we’re so often the ones on the frontlines and we’re the ones most directly impacted by the policies we want to change. It’s important for us to be able to tell our own stories and build the power of our own communities.”
Interested in becoming a 2017 Kairos Fellow? Learn more and apply here: kairosfellows.org.
