Pillars Fund

The Pillars Fund (Pillars) is a nonprofit grantmaking organization whose mission is to amplify the leadership, voices, and talents of Muslims in the United States. Since its founding in 2010, Pillars has distributed more than $9 million in grants to Muslim organizations and leaders to advance its mission. This grant supports Pillars to convene a group of leading journalism and media professionals for a two-day workshop in Chicago in May 2024 to design a new program of support for Muslim journalists in the U.S. The goal of this new program is to build community amongst Muslim journalists, provide professional development opportunities to support their career ambitions, advocate for greater representation of Muslims in newsrooms across the country, and to support the development of more accurate and nuanced news reporting about Muslims in the U.S.

The Pillars Fund (Pillars) is a nonprofit grantmaking organization whose mission is to amplify the leadership, voices, and talents of Muslims in the United States. Since its founding in 2010, Pillars has distributed more than $6 million in grants to Muslim organizations and leaders to advance its mission. In an effort to change inaccurate and incomplete narratives about Muslims in the United States, four years ago Pillars also began investing in Muslim artists and storytellers and engaging media and entertainment industry leaders to promote more accurate and nuanced stories about Muslims for broad mainstream distribution. This grant provides flexible support for Pillars’ storytelling and narrative change work, including efforts to build the storytelling capacity of its network of grassroots grantee organizations and to recast inaccurate and misleading characterizations of Muslims in American media and popular culture.

Since its founding in 2010, the Pillars Fund has been a leading voice for the American Muslim community. Initially created as a donor advised giving circle, Pillars has grown into a leading philanthropic and advocacy organization that ensures American Muslim stories and voices are seen and heard. This grant supports Pillars to design and implement a series of storytelling and culture change activities that amplify the voices of Muslim-Americans, challenge narrative tropes that misrepresent the Muslim American experience, and build up a cadre of professional storytellers committed to creating content for mass audiences that accurately depicts the full range of lived experiences and perspectives of Muslims in the United States. These activities are designed to engage the millions of American Muslims across the country in storytelling efforts designed to push back against negative stereotypes and recast public narratives and perceptions about their contributions to American society.

Since its founding in 2010, the Pillars Fund has been a leading voice for the American Muslim community. Initially founded as a donor advised giving circle, Pillars has grown into a leading philanthropic and advocacy organization that ensures American Muslim stories and voices are seen and heard. Grant funds are being used to launch a new initiative at Pillars designed to equip members of its diverse community to tell their own stories, lift up a range of perspectives within Muslim-American communities across the country, and shed light on often under-represented or misunderstood issues related to the Muslim- American experience. MacArthur support is helping to move Pillars beyond its initial scope of providing funding to community-based organizations to become a go-to source for information and expertise about Muslim Americans. The initiative’s goal is to engage the millions of American Muslims across the country in media making efforts designed to push back against negative stereotypes and recast public narratives and perceptions about their contributions to American society and democracy.