Majālis Fund Shura Council
This document is for you — the community leaders, cultural anchors, and organizational builders who are being invited into the Majālis Fund Shura Council. It gives you background on the regranting program you'd be participating in, the larger fund it lives inside, and why we believe these two things belong together.
Read it at whatever depth you want. The program details are in Part One. If you want to understand the bigger picture — the fund's investment thesis, its economic philosophy, and where it's going — that's in Parts Two and Three. If you just want to know what you're signing up for and whether it's worth your time, Part One will answer that.
Part One
The Shura Council & Sustaining Our Arts
The Shura Council is a cross-diaspora advisory and decision-making body being convened by Holistic Underground along the I-880 corridor of the San Francisco Bay Area. Its purpose is straightforward: to put the power of arts grantmaking directly into the hands of MENA and SWANA community leaders, rather than filtering it through an institutional committee that may not know our communities from the inside.
Over three facilitated in-person gatherings, the Shura Council will:
Convene leaders from across the full breadth of our Bay Area SWANA and MENA communities —Nile Valley, Levant, Maghreb, Persian, Kurdish, Arabian Peninsula, Horn of Africa, and beyond.
Sit together honestly with the real challenges facing our communities: Islamophobia, surveillance, backlash from ongoing wars, generational divides, sectarianism, colorism, and the chronic underfunding of our cultural life.
Build relationships across difference over time — not a one-day meeting, but a sustained gathering with real continuity between sessions.
Receive training in ethics-grounded nomination practices rooted in Islamic Shura principles — and then exercise that authority to nominate performing artists for grants.
Shape how a growing fund understands its responsibilities to the communities it serves — including beyond this program cycle.
What the Council Does
The Grants
The council will collectively nominate approximately ten performing artists and cultural bearers for $20,000 capacity-building grants each. These are not one-time project grants. They are investments in long-term artistic infrastructure — designed to strengthen the sustained practice of musicians, dancers, theater-makers, poets, and mixed media artists who are the carriers of our communities' cultural memory.
Who We Are Looking For
We are building a council that reflects the full geography of our communities. We seek representatives from organizations and collectives rooted in:
We welcome formal nonprofits, informal collectives, faith-based institutions, and cultural hubs. What matters is that you are grounded in your community and committed to building solidarity across difference.
What Council Members Receive
$2,000 organizational honorarium for full participation in the Shura Council program. Invitation to Real and the Radiant — Holistic Underground's 10-year anniversary and the official public launch of the Majālis Fund — May 16, 2026, Oakstop California Ballroom, Oakland.
Capacity-building resources: training in marketing, fundraising, facilitation, project management, and technology.
For 501(c)(3) organizations: potential additional nonprofit capacity-building support through Holistic Underground.
A founding seat at the table of something larger — and a relationship with a fund that is explicitly built to put resources in service of communities like yours.
Part Two
About the Majālis Fund
The Shura Council regranting program is the Fund's first community-facing work — and its first proof of concept. But it lives inside something larger. This section explains what the Majālis Fund actually is, why it was built the way it was built, and what it's trying to do in the world.
You don't need to understand the fund to participate in the Shura Council. But many people who've heard about it have wanted to know more — so this is here for you.
What the Fund Is
Majālis — from the Arabic for 'gatherings' — is an impact investment fund launched by Holistic Underground. It is not a conventional fund. It is a long-horizon stewardship institution designed to rebuild the economic infrastructure that once made ordinary people — not just corporations and conglomerates — the engines of commerce, culture, and community life.
The fund operates across three pillars. Each is designed to reinforce the others — culture builds trust, commerce builds livelihood, and cohesion builds the conditions that make both possible.
For most of human history, trade was a common person's path to prosperity. The silk roads, the markets of Córdoba and Baghdad, the caravans of the Nile Valley, the guild networks of the Ottoman Empire — these were not the exclusive domain of wealthy institutions. Ordinary merchants, artisans, and community traders participated in long-distance commerce, shared infrastructure, and governed markets collectively.
That changed. Over the past two centuries, global trade has been progressively consolidated by large corporations and financial institutions, while the structures that once allowed ordinary people to participate — public markets, guild credit, profit-sharing trade loans, shared infrastructure as a commons — were dismantled or privatized.
Contemporary evidence supports this. China's Belt and Road Initiative is rebuilding long-distance trade networks. The Yiwu Market model — a city of cluster-based small traders — outcompetes larger players through density and shared infrastructure. BRICS dedollarization signals a global shift toward bilateral, real-asset exchange. Blockchain technology is enabling new forms of commodity- backed currency and community finance. The real economy is reasserting itself.
Majālis is positioning to be part of that shift — starting in the corridors where our communities already have relationships, networks, and knowledge.
The Core Thesis: Democratizing Trade
How the Fund Works
Majālis deploys capital through instruments rooted in the Islamic economic tradition of Muamalat —the body of practice governing ethical real-economy transactions. This is not a rebranding ofconventional finance. It is a substantively different approach to how money moves.
No interest, no speculation
The fund does not use interest-bearing instruments or speculative financial products. Capital moves through profit-sharing and asset-backed structures only.Real assets only
Every investment is anchored to something tangible — goods, land, infrastructure, productive enterprise. Nothing abstract.Community governed
Governance is built on shura — mutual consultation. The council that governs arts regranting is a direct expression of the same principle that governs capital deployment.Long-horizon stewardship
Majālis is not optimizing for quick returns. It is designed as a multi-generational institution, built to outlast its founders.Partners, not subjects
Grantees and investment partners are treated as collaborators in a shared project, not as recipients or experimental subjects of an institutional program.
Where the Fund Is Now
Majālis is in its founding stage. Initial capital is being deployed through a trade finance corridor — construction materials moving from Egypt into Sudan — structured as a profit-sharing arrangement between the fund and an established broker network with existing relationships on the ground. Agricultural pilots and land investments in California are in active development as Phase 2 and 3 targets.
The fund is anchored by two founding institutional relationships: the Hewlett Foundation, which supports the Sustaining Our Arts regranting program, and the Fetzer Institute, which has provided unrestricted seed capital for the fund's development. A small Founding Circle of Capital Partners and Ecosystem Advisors is being confirmed before the May 2026 public launch.
The Shura Council is not separate from this work. It is where the fund's principles — community governance, long-horizon investment, shura as a functional mechanism — first take concrete form. What the council demonstrates in arts regranting is the same model the fund intends to apply at scale.
Part Three
What Happens Next
Timeline
The Launch: Real and the Radiant
The Majālis Fund will be publicly launched on May 16, 2026 at Holistic Underground's 10-year anniversary celebration — Real and the Radiant — at the Oakstop California Ballroom, 1736 Franklin St, Oakland.
Shura Council members will be invited as guests of the fund. This is not a donor gala or a conventional nonprofit event. It is a gathering — a majlis — designed to mark the beginning of something that is meant to last.
If You Want to Know More
The full Majālis Fund technical thesis — covering investment corridors, financial structures, the Muamalat compliance framework, and the long-term vision for the fund — is available for those who want to go deeper. Reach out to Mazin directly and he'll share it with you.
And regardless: come to the launch. See who else is in the room. That will tell you more than any document can.
Holistic Underground
Holistic Underground works most closely with mission-rooted projects that have a clear public benefit and a real path to funding — coalitions, NGOs, spiritual entrepreneurs, arts and culture initiatives, health equity and community empowerment work, leadership development programs, and fellowships. We generally work with projects at roughly $50k in annual budget and above, since the depth of service we invest in each project only makes sense at that scale. We're selective because we invest deeply in every project we host, and we're honest about fit: when a project isn't ready, or when another sponsor would serve it better, we say so and point the way.
If you want a clear read on whether your project qualifies and whether HU is the right fit, we'd welcome the conversation.