January 10, 2002 | Read Time: 9 minutes
Detroit advocate faces challenges in raising funds and securing future for social-services group
Ismael Ahmed admits that his Arabic is awful. Yet the Brooklyn-born 54-year-old
has become an Arab-American leader through a charity he helped found here 31 years ago to provide translation services to immigrants.
The charity, the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services, in this Detroit suburb, has grown vastly over the years, offering, among other things, emergency food and shelter, health care, job training, youth recreation, and cultural programs. It was one of the nation’s first nonreligious Arab-American groups, and one of the first to help people from a range of Arab countries. And with annual revenue of $10-million and as many as 50,000 people served each year, it is now considered the country’s biggest Arab-American social-services provider.
“Our first year, we helped 125 people, providing English classes, translating tax forms, interpreting,” Mr. Ahmed says. “But [the center] has always been about much more than language. It’s been about helping new immigrants and low-income people in different ways. It’s been about being an advocate.”
Metropolitan Detroit is home to roughly 300,000 Arab-Americans — one of the largest populations of Arabs outside the Middle East — and the center is often thought of as the heart of the area’s Arab political and social activism. At the same time, Mr. Ahmed, the center’s executive director, is considered to be an unofficial spokesman for the region’s Arab population, a role that has broadened considerably since September 11, as he has condemned the attacks, called for unity and patriotism, and sought to foster better understanding by non-Arabs of Arab culture.
But even before September 11, a key goal for Mr. Ahmed and his organization, known by its acronym Access, has been, as Mr. Ahmed says, “to institutionalize our role as Arab-Americans in this country.”
To do so, he says, means to build the institutions that will serve and celebrate Arab-Americans, a diverse group of people — Muslims and Christians — who have emigrated from areas of the Middle East and North Africa. Top on the list: the creation of a national museum and cultural center, which Access hopes to open in 2004. The organization also is finishing construction of a health-care and medical-research center, and plans to build a recreation facility.
No Full-Time Fund Raiser
To pay for those projects, Access is about to announce a $15-million fund-raising drive called the Arab American Heritage Campaign.
The campaign presents unusual challenges for the group, which has 150 staff members but no full-time fund raiser, and which, until about five years ago, depended on government money for more than 90 percent of its revenue. Last year, Access raised about one-quarter of its income from private sources, but it still considers itself fairly new at soliciting big gifts.
In 1998, the organization started its first capital campaign, aiming to raise $3.85-million for the construction of an employment and job-training center. It reached its goal in only nine months, in large part, says Maha Freij, Access’s fiscal officer, because Mr. Ahmed for the first time asked for sizable donations.
“Access was 28 years in existence and never had a gift from any corporation, including Ford Motor Company, for more than $20,000,” Ms. Freij says. “We are right in their backyard. How can you not solicit their support?”
Ford, with its mammoth Rouge River car-making plant that abuts the neighborhood here that is home to Access and thousands of Arab immigrants, gave $400,000 to the 1998 campaign, and has pledged $2-million to this year’s drive.
Seeking Money From Individuals
Access has also only recently started to systematically cultivate and solicit individual donors — tasks, Ms. Freij says, made complicated by some Arab traditions.
Chief among them, she says, is an informal approach to charity. Giving is often based on emotion, not on careful financial, tax, or estate planning, she says, and gifts typically go first to one’s family members, or directly to others in need. Arab-Americans are also likely to donate to their churches or mosques, and to send money to family members or charities in their homeland, before contributing to an American organization such as Access, she says.
“Arabs are very generous,” Ms. Freij says, “but there’s no planning. A woman takes off her gold bracelet and gives it to a person in need.”
Ms. Freij, a Palestinian who moved from Israel to the Detroit area in 1989, says she finds she must teach other new immigrants some basic concepts of American philanthropy, including pledging money over time and making bequests.
‘Move Up and Out’
Arab-Americans who have been in this country for many years — including the descendants of Middle Eastern families who settled in the Detroit area starting in the 1890s — have other lessons to learn, says Mr. Ahmed. They may be giving generously to nonprofit organizations, such as colleges and museums, but, he says, many may not contribute to, or even know about, the area’s Arab-American groups.
“There’s been the attempt to acculturate — move up and out,” Mr. Ahmed says. “Our challenge now is to bring our sense of community to a broader community of Arab-Americans, not just newer immigrants.”
One way Access is doing that, he says, is through its arts programs. The group, for example, helped sponsor a performance by the Umm Kulthoum Orchestra, of Egypt, at the Detroit Symphony Orchestra Hall.
Relating to Different Generations
Of a mixed Middle Eastern background, Mr. Ahmed says he can relate to both the newly arrived immigrants — up to 5,000 Arabs emigrate to the Detroit area each year — and the third- and fourth-generation Arab-American families. Many of the first Arab immigrants were Christians who were peddlers and merchants, and who later attracted more newcomers to settle in the area as job opportunities grew along with the burgeoning automobile industry. Since World War II, most new arrivals from Arab countries have been Muslims.
Mr. Ahmed’s mother’s family came to the United States from what is now Lebanon more than 100 years ago. His father arrived from Egypt at age 10. His stepfather, who helped to raise Mr. Ahmed, came from Yemen.
When Mr. Ahmed was 6, his father, who had owned a series of small shops in Brooklyn and distributed Arab records and films, moved his family to Michigan looking for a more-lucrative market for Arab movies. Despite the distance, Mr. Ahmed maintained a close relationship with his maternal grandmother, Aliya Hassen, who was an Islamic and civil-rights activist in Manhattan. Among other high-profile exploits, says Mr. Ahmed, his grandmother led a demonstration at the United Nations in support of Egyptian nationalism, and helped her close friend Malcolm X arrange his first trip to the Middle East.
By the end of the 1960s, Mr. Ahmed was engaged in his own social activism. He fought the city of Dearborn over an urban-renewal plan that would have turned the largely Arab-American southeastern part of the city into an industrial zone. Not long after the city backed off its plan, Mr. Ahmed and about a dozen of his fellow activists created Access in a neighborhood storefront.
Mr. Ahmed, who earned an education certificate and sociology degree at the University of Michigan’s Dearborn campus, served in the U.S. Army, and worked at car plants and on an overseas freighter, volunteered at Access for several years. He became executive director in 1980.
Since then, he has won awards for outstanding nonprofit leadership; been praised by foundation and other nonprofit officials as an able lobbyist and civic leader; and been recognized by other civic leaders for his work in building better relations among the area’s many ethnic and racial groups. And Mr. Ahmed’s reputation has grown nationally since September 11.
His phone began ringing almost immediately after the attacks. Among the first calls: Ford’s chairman, William Clay Ford Jr., to ask what the company could do to help contain the anti-Arab sentiment that was sure to bubble up.
In the following days and weeks, Mr. Ahmed met with Mr. Ford and a host of other business leaders, government officials, and representatives from various civic and nonprofit groups to call for civil-rights protections, and for ethnic and religious tolerance. Access organized blood drives, and put together teams of counselors and educators to visit area schools to help both Arab and non-Arab students deal with the trauma of the attacks and learn more about Arab culture.
Access also joined with other charities, municipal agencies, and religious groups to sponsor an interfaith candlelighting vigil, a citywide unity rally, a town meeting, and a concert designed to raise awareness of the issue of racial profiling.
Hate Mail
Still, like so many other Arab-Americans, Mr. Ahmed has felt the post-September 11 backlash. He has received dozens of letters and e-mails containing threats and hateful words. A group of young white men in a car followed him as he drove to work one day, shouting epithets and threats to kill him.
Mr. Ahmed has also been dogged by press reports that two men of Middle Eastern descent who were held by authorities in the wake of the attacks had received money through Access’s job-training program to take truck-driving courses. Questions about the situation anger him. He says that Access, which teaches jobs skills to as many non-Arabs as to Arab-Americans, has been unfairly singled out for criticism.
Still, he says, he is not worried that the group’s reputation will be tarnished by all the attention to the case, including a segment on the CBS show “60 Minutes,” because, he says, Access has “such a great track record.”
And, he says, the threats, accusations, suspicions, and fears directed toward Arab-Americans since September 11 have actually strengthened his hopes for the future of Access: “It makes us want to redouble our efforts — raise the money, open the museum, teach people about who we are, and institutionalize our presence in this country so that we are seen as part of the whole, as Americans, not separate.”
ISMAEL AHMED, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF ARAB COMMUNITY CENTER FOR ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL SERVICES
Age: 54
Place of birth: Brooklyn, N.Y.
Education: Earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology and an education certificate at the University of Michigan at Dearborn.
Previous employment: Auto worker, merchant marine
