Experiences of Muslims in the U.S.

Speaker Biography

Darakshan Raja | Founding Executive Director

Pronouns: she/her/hers

Darakshan Raja (She/Hers) is the founding executive director of Muslims for Just Futures (MJF) where she manages the organization’s overall development, programming, administration, and strategic direction. Darakshan leads MJF’s national advocacy and movement-building efforts, local Chicago power-building programming, and the DC Guaranteed Income program.

Darakshan is an abolitionist who made her way to organizing through the anti-violence movement providing crisis advocacy support to survivors in NYC. Her work with survivors on the outside and inside who were criminalized for self-defense has been central to adopting abolition as a theory of change and organizing. She is passionate about building power, bringing organizing visions to life, and figuring out ways to build a strong infrastructure for movement work. Darakshan has developed organizing institutes, frameworks on gendered and structural Islamophobia, narrative projects, civic engagement campaigns, advocacy efforts focused on gender justice legislation, multi-year mutual aid campaigns focused on workers, and MJF’s guaranteed income program.

Darakshan’s research and policy evaluation experience includes working at the Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center where she worked on a range of projects focused on evaluating government responses to survivors and conditions for youth incarcerated in state detention facilities, including serving as project director on an evaluation of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and access to SAFE exams for survivors. She was appointed to the DC Government’s Street Harassment Advisory Committee, a body that oversaw the implementation of the Street Harassment Prevention Act.

She has served as a New Leaders Council Chicago Fellow and served as a community fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Social Concern. Darakshan’s experience in philanthropy includes serving on the nominations committee of the Emergent Fund and as a board of trustees for IF: A Foundation for Radical Possibility in order to support resourcing movements and frontline organizers.

Darakshan holds a MA in Forensic Psychology from John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY), a Nonprofit Management Certificate from Georgetown University’s Center for Public & Nonprofit Leadership, and is currently a part-time MBA student at U of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.

Muslims for Just Futures

Muslims for Just Futures envisions a society where our communities live with dignity, power, and freedom. Muslims for Just Futures’ local work spans the DC, MD, and VA (DMV) region and Chicago. MJF is committed to building long-term power and base-building in the region with a focus on centering working-class communities and women. We are also committed to building grassroots power nationally through our movement-building and advocacy work.

Building Grassroots Power Locally and Nationally

MJF uses a divest and reinvest framework to build power in Muslim communities that have been impacted by Islamophobia and the ways it has been codified through the War on Terror. Islamophobia has resulted in divestment from Muslim communities, which disproportionately harms working-class communities and women.

Thus, MJF prioritizes building the leadership of women with an emphasis on working-class Muslim women. Locally, MJF reinvests into Muslim communities by prioritizing gender justice, economic justice, and healing justice through our base-building, leadership development, and mutual aid efforts.

Nationally, MJF builds power by centering the leadership of Muslim women led grassroots organizations through the Muslim Abolitionist Futures Network, where we are working towards building movement support for our joint policy agenda demanding divestment from the War on Terror and an investment into communities of care.

Led by women and non-binary organizers rooted in the communities we support, we are building grassroots power today to ensure just futures tomorrow.

For any questions, please contact Dr. Melanie Bush, bush@adelphi.edu.

Proudly Sponsored by The Department of Sociology, The African, Black and Caribbean Studies Program, The Levermore Global Scholars Program and the Innovation Center.