Tom Facchine – Every Mosque In America Should Implement This
AI: Summary ©
The speakers discuss the trend of "endowment" as a financial technology that allows individuals to use their profits to fund projects and communities. This is a popular and unsustainable model, as it requires minimal capital and is undignified. The "endowment" model is seen as a way to avoid unnecessary expenses and empower the Muslim community.
AI: Summary ©
One of the things that has to change
is moving from a fundraising model to a
waqf or an endowment model.
So right now the status quo is you've
got a handful, half dozen to a dozen
big donors in a community, and they're the
ones who write the checks every year at
the Ramadan fundraiser in the middle of Tarawih
that keep the community going.
And as long as that's the model, then
you're essentially captive to their vision of what
the mosque is going to be.
That if they decide that you're doing something
that they don't like, and it might have
nothing to do with Islam, or it might
not be valid whatsoever, but they can pull
the plug at any time, and you don't
have any ability to push back against that.
And they're the ones who, like we said,
there's no double-blind donations.
Everybody knows that they're the people who are
writing the checks, and so people are going
to fall over themselves to satisfy those things,
even if they're not in the best interest
of the community.
So one of the ways to do it,
we talked about a double-blind donation scheme.
Another way is moving to an endowment model,
which a lot of mosques now have learned
or have learned of that is becoming more
popular, where your operational expenses are not tied
up to donations that are happening, that they
are taken care of through the use of
fruct or through the profit that is being
made from some sort of asset that's owned
by the mosque in collective.
So that's, I think, a really, really important
financial technology that, honestly, the Muslim world used
for over a thousand years, for 1400 years,
in order to do what governments do today.
Before there were these sorts of...
governments didn't use to pave roads, they didn't
use to fund hospitals, they didn't use to
take care of the orphans, or the mentally
ill, or these sorts of things.
This is all taken care of by the
endowments in the Muslim lands.
So much so that when the European colonizers
came to the Muslim lands, they realized that
they had to dismantle the system if they
wanted to conquer the Muslims, and that's exactly
what they did.
So we have the ability to resurrect this
model in the United States, and it's actually
a key component to getting a little bit
of a buffer between who's putting in the
money and who's able to call the shots
and chart the course for the empowerment and
the direction of the Muslim community.
That way, if you have a rental property,
you're collecting rents, whatever you're...
you have your profit that you're making off
of it, you put back into the asset
what you need to maintain it.
You're not going to be a slumlord, right?
But whatever's left over is going to be
dedicated towards something.
Now, it could be the imam's salary.
I know of a lot of imams that
it's embarrassing.
I know an imam who had his salary
written on a whiteboard up in the musalla,
and that's there for everybody to see.
When they fundraise, and the imam is supposed
to fundraise, it's as if he's begging for
his own salary.
That's not uncommon.
So think about what you're doing to your
religious leader and what messages you're sending and
how emasculating and infantilizing that sort of is
and how undignified that is.
As opposed to, we know that this is
coming from here, and this is something that
our operational expenses...
I think the goal for every mosque is
that our operational expenses should be covered by
the endowment.
So that when you're fundraising, you're funding for
capital projects.
We want a new gym.
We want this.
We want that.
People would love to give their money to
that because they know that the electricity bill
and the water bill and the normal things
that are always going to be expenses are
being handled already.
Then you can grow as a community.
As long as every mosque is passing around
the hat just to keep the lights on
and pay the imam, and you're not even
really paying the imam that much, we can't
really expect to take off like that as
a community.