We the Nonprofit Founders: Dreaming, Building, and Nurturing Democracy for All

I arrived in America in the mid-1980s, an awkward bookish international student from Belize. For the first time in my life, I faced new questions about my identity: Are you Seminole or Cherokee? So, you’re from Brazil? Do you eat with chopsticks in India?

In many ways, my civic journey has mirrored what I see as the political maturity of the South Asian community: from international student to green card holder to US citizen to New York City’s first Commissioner of Immigrant Affairs to national leader. Initially, we feel like guests, then begin organizing and voting. Over time, we seek office and hold those in power accountable.

Among my early explorations in the 1990s, as I was moving through multiple immigration statuses, I was understanding the racial typology in the United States. Who am I, I wondered, as an Indian-born Belizean living in a country that categorizes people as Asian, Black, Latine, White? The search for answers started me on a path that eventually led to my work as a nonprofit founder and practitioner of belonging.

During this time in New York, others like me were asking similar questions about identity and belonging. This exploration gave birth to groups like the South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association (SALGA) in 1991 and Sakhi, founded in 1989. Unlike the regional groups (such as Gujarati Samaj) or national identity groups (like Association of Indians in America) that existed until then, emerging leaders embraced an umbrella term for the community: South Asian. In doing so, they advanced a sense of belonging by including everyone who traced their heritage to the Indian subcontinent.

Funding is not just money. It’s affirmation of the need, recognition of a group of people. It’s support on their journey on the trail of American history.

This decision paved the way for future organizing, creating a space that served specific segments of the community while extending the invitation beyond Indians. Within this expansion, other groups emerged, like South Asian Youth Action, which I founded in 1996, Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), and Chaaya CDC, both founded in 2000. These entities adopted language that created a sense of belonging for the South Asian diaspora.

After September 11, 2001, the presence of these groups, the trust they had built with communities, and the infrastructure they had in place made immediate and culturally competent responses possible. More organizations emerged in the aftermath of 9/11, including the Sikh Coalition and South Asian Council for Social Services. Together, these groups pave essential pathways to belonging: They provide services, organize, and educate our communities and advocate for their members.

As board chair of the North Star Fund, I see how the work of the civic sector is both timeless and time-sensitive. New communities—united by history or circumstance—founded groups like Adelante Student Voices to serve undocumented students or Afrikana to support Black and Muslim New York City residents. Funding is not just money. It’s affirmation of the need, recognition of a group of people. It’s support on their journey on the trail of American history.

Five Principles of Belonging

By cultivating what The Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, describes as “both a feeling and practice,” nonprofits offer affirmation that is lacking in mainstream institutions. Cultural expression, in-language service delivery, and community organizing help strengthen our muscle to participate in a democracy that wasn’t built for us but must include us.

With a dream for a better world, nonprofit leaders build organizations that nurture belonging in five essential ways.

1. Making a path that does not exist. As a first-generation college student, immigrant, and nonprofit leader, the words of the Spanish poet Antonio Machado—se hace camino al andar (“the path is made by walking”)—describe my journey. When I started South Asian Youth Action—the first secular, pan-South Asian space for young people in the United States—I understood that we make the road by walking. The original name of the now-national organization, Make the Road, describes what we do as nonprofit leaders, particularly founders. In the absence of existing programming to support the needs of undocumented students, women experiencing violence, or LGBTQ+ folks from the Caribbean, nonprofits envision, launch, and build spaces to meet those needs. We navigate whatever twists and turns that road takes, smoothing bumps and paving dirt tracks to create a path for the communities we serve.
2. Shaping inclusion with language and expanding who sees themselves as part of our organizations and society at large. At a talk I recently attended, the poet Aja Monet said: “Language is a live art form; it has the ability to shape people’s sense of self.” In the early days of New American Leaders, a candidate training organization, we described our target population as first- and second-generation immigrants. After a couple of years, we referred to our community as first- and second-generation Americans. This is the work of words. They help us see ourselves, invite us in, build worlds within worlds. Whether that’s lifting up the uniqueness of the Nepali experience in a pan-Asian American context, as Adhikaar does, or the specificity of Black immigrant journeys in the larger immigrant narrative, as does, the sector names and proclaims who we are and why we matter. When Sakhi for South Asian Women changed its name to Sakhi for South Asian Survivors, it embraced a gender-expansive approach to serving the community.
3. Setting new tables that welcome those who have not been invited to or don’t feel safe at existing tables. Shirley Chisholm famously invited us to bring a folding chair when there’s no seat at the table for us. But what happens when the existing table is not one where we feel welcome or safe? I often created organizations as a rejection of the mainstream institutions or frameworks: tables that were serving a menu that didn’t reflect my communities’ interests and needs. The spaces nonprofits build are alternatives to predominantly White, male, or adult tables. Youth thrive in environments designed for them, as women of color do in organizations that reflect their needs. Sometimes these places are entry points, sometimes endpoints. These “new tables” are linguistically specific, culturally competent, experientially aligned. They have proliferated in the last decade as America grows more diverse and Americans recognize that our existing tables were set for wealthy, White males.
4. Using our voices to ensure that our needs are understood, our alliances fortified, and our demands met. As a young leader, I learned that serving the South Asian community was not enough. To educate others about the ways they were failing to serve our young people, I joined youth affinity groups, spoke to funders and donors about what we were hearing from community members, and visited schools to advocate for young people. The job couldn’t end with service provision, but had to extend to advocacy for resources, representation, and policy change. Individual nonprofit leaders also organize under umbrellas like the New York Immigration Coalition, gaining strength in numbers. Together, we become stronger advocates for community needs and, when we work best, we allow for smaller or emerging organizations to benefit from the capacity of larger and more established organizations. Working in a coalition also helps us find common ground—between Georgia and Michigan, or between new arrivals and senior citizens—to advance understanding and strengthen the country’s civic fabric.
5. Serving as a bridge between our communities and others, between our organizations and government, between the present and the future. When I first floated the idea of an organization to recruit and train immigrants to run for office (in 2010), we were optimistic about the election of our first Black president and recovering from a fiscal crisis. No one believed that the time was right. But I knew that we had to become the architects of change; more than raising money, my challenge was bringing people along, using data and conviction. This is an essential and often unseen component of the work, the investment of time and effort by nonprofit staff to educate those who are unaware, those who are in power, and those who may not yet believe in the same vision of the future we have. This bridging work is often in addition to program delivery and sometimes sits alongside advocacy. Whether we’re raising money, speaking to legislative bodies, or appearing on television, nonprofit leaders are bridging the gap between what we know about our communities and what the world believes or sees.

These five principles are neither sequential nor neatly siloed. Our goal then and now is not to separate or ghettoize but to affirm and strengthen community members so they know and feel they belong. Only then can they show up with awareness of their rights in every space: schools, workplaces, streets, town halls, and city halls.

Dream It, Build It, Nurture It

In the 1990s, many leaders understood the assignment. Prescience and commitment from dedicated folks laid the foundation for where we are today. Similarly, today’s visionaries are making the road for the world of tomorrow.

In 2025, we marked a major milestone when Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor. Before his mayoral victory, winning the primary in June 2025 is a credit to South Asian organizers whose work began years and even decades ago. We were ready—as a city and as South Asians—to meet the Mamdani moment. This win is both the cause and effect of a new sense of optimism among many communities—South Asian, Muslim, young people. We participated because the campaign and the organizing that preceded it had cultivated a sense of belonging through participation. We belonged, therefore we participated; we participated, therefore we belonged. What comes first—belonging or participation—is perhaps less relevant than how one reinforces the other.

New York City’s 2025 election operationalized the call of The Bigger We report by the Freedom Together Foundation: “If we want to advance a pluralist democracy in America, we must create organizations that invite people into a wider community and allow them to experience the power of collective action.”

Forty years since my arrival in America, I’m still awkward and bookish. But I’m also outspoken and deeply committed to American democracy. My personal experience and career path have affirmed the power of our sector as a lever for change and a fundamental building block of the democracy we need today and in the future.

Nothing is guaranteed to us. We must dream it, build it, nurture it.