Where Faith Meets the American Dream Zakat Foundation of America

Here’s how its Turkish-born, Kurdish-American executive director, Halil Demir, who founded the charity as a one-man operation just two months before the 9/11cataclysm in 2001, put it.
“It’s all in the name. We are the Zakat Foundation of America.”

“Islam has just Five Pillars of faith, and the basic humanitarian moral value of a yearly obligatory poor-alms of Zakat on your wealth is one of them. And as an American charitable institution, we also embody the strong cultural values of freedom, self-reliance, competitive opportunity, and achievement through hard work that have forged a common American identity out of millions of people from all other the world,” he says.
Key to both Zakat Foundation’s religiously and socially values-driven humanitarian mission is the sense of personal responsibility for the wellbeing of your neighbors. So even though it is an international charity, with robust humanitarian programs across 45 countries on four continents, from its inception Zakat Foundation has served the impoverished, afflicted, and dislocated here at home.
Its Long Island center is part of that compassionate commitment to providing material and spiritual human help as a reflection of faith and cultural affinity, making it now one of 11 such urban centers the charity has opened for local communities with burgeoning need across the country. It is well-placed.

Government statistics present Long Island residents as beneficiaries of one of the lowest communal poverty rates in the country at 7%. But this does not accurately portray the far grimmer reality of many of its struggling families. The “household survival budget” paints a truer portrait.

Nearly 40% of Long Islanders live below the federal poverty line, twice the number of the remainder of New York City. Food insecurity presents a risk to half its population, with Central Brooklyn designated as one of New York City’s most blighted food deserts. At least 50% of Long Island locals now depend on government assistance for basic needs.

Zakat Foundation through its new center is looking to do what it has done in its other urban community centers – create programs to enhance the lives of impoverished families, and especially children. Its main initiatives will ultimately focus on food security, badly needed healthcare assistance (with poor health and the spread of communicable diseases major consequences of poverty), job training, and, essentially, the human aspect: community building by forging relationships and alliances between individuals and groups who would otherwise not likely have opportunities to know one another and plan and work together.

Zakat Foundation is by no means a newcomer to humanitarian work in New York. In 2010, it began a celebrated hot food and nutrition distribution program, notably in Brooklyn. When Hurricane Sandy struck in 2012, it delivered multiple levels of humanitarian assistance for the afflicted, including food distribution, emergency relief supplies, and shelter provisions.

When the Covid pandemic spread, Zakat Foundation launched a truly innovative nationwide fresh farm food distribution program, picking up and hauling crops and product from supply-chain abandoned farmers left to waste or plow it under, and re-packaging it in its own warehouses for trucking and distributing it to the immobile elderly and impoverished families.

This came in addition to its vital PPE supply intervention initiative for healthcare facilities in big cities simply cut off in the shortage by the big health conglomerates and suppliers. As late as 2023, its volunteers were still assisting some 12,000 deprived residents with hygiene kits, emergency supplies, and hot meals.

These New York programs mirror Zakat Foundation humanitarian activities in other U.S. urban areas. On Chicago’s Southside, in the impoverished Englewood food desert, for example, with food prices surging in recent years, the charity has routinely distributed hundreds of hefty Thanksgiving turkeys and holiday food packages freely to families. In the city’s struggling Pilsen neighborhood, it arranged abundant holiday food catering at no cost to needful families.

Or take the George Floyd-sparked protests. Just eight days into the marches and curfew clampdowns on Minneapolis after the police killed Floyd on Memorial Day 2020, Demir, Zakat Foundation’s director, himself hauled nearly 14 tons of fresh produce and milk into the heart of the city’s food-barren Powderhorn community for free distribution to the seriously food-deprived at four locations, including the tribute site for Floyd.
Joined by U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D), together they personally put hundreds of boxes – each filled with about 25 pounds of colorful fruits and vegetables – into the hands of families stranded in the community’s eight impoverished neighborhoods with no open groceries, shops or dependable public services at the time.

“Faith is action, not only what you believe in,” says Demir. “Faith is being here today, where people need you.”

That’s the purpose Demir articulates for Zakat Foundation of America’s broad and growing urban relief hubs, including the recent Long Island center. His words exactly sum up the twin moral-communal values powering the international charity’s unique humanitarian compassion to poverty-burdened communities at home.

“We are hoping we can contribute a little bit, give a little bit to heal our nation and bring love.”

###