Vision 2020
CAIR San Diego
Introduction: Building a New Vision
for the San Diego Muslim Community
Beauty and pain, wealth and poverty, opportunity and
oppression, these things all exist simultaneously in
San Diego County. In the midst of all this is the Muslim
community facing these same realities across 30
Mosques from North County to Tijuana. How do we
realize the full potential and power of our community
at a local level, at a county level, statewide, and even
bi-nationally across the Southern border?
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has called the 2020
election the movement of our lives, and so we are
building for 2020 today. This year as CAIR National
and CAIR California celebrate our 25th anniversary, at
CAIR San Diego we are thinking about how we build
a vision for the next 25 years. The core of our vision
is that we must build and defend our community
and build as much power as possible across political,
media, and cultural arenas.
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For the last 25 years, CAIR California has defended
the Muslim community across the state through legal
and media based work. Today in San Diego we are
building an innovation-oriented CAIR chapter focused
on maintaining this legacy while building for the future
through growing Muslim community organizing across
San Diego County, while also expanding our digital
presence through storytelling and digital campaigns
that empower our community.
Over the last year we have put this vision into
action in three core issue areas. First in our
foundational work as an institution, combating racism,
Islamophobia and White supremacy, what we call
“Know One Another.” We are expanding this work
throughout our county to create dynamic organizing
campaigns focused on key areas in East County and
North County through congregation based organizing
teams at Mosques.
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Second, we have worked to help develop the TRUST will be hosting the Muslim Game Changers Network
San Diego coalition in San Diego with 40 community focused at Muslim High School youth in SD for the
based organizations, in our work we are calling “Do first time.
Not Spy.” With this campaign we are diving deep
into the layers of surveillance the Muslim community It is our prayer for our community to be united in
is facing, and how this has impacted our ally these difficult times, and to be voices of justice, mercy
communities throughout the County. and love that can bring people together of all faiths
and backgrounds to build the world we all want to live
Finally, over the last eight months we have worked in where each of us have a deep sense of belonging in
with our partners at the Border Church to create the place we live.
a Border Mosque that meets monthly on the US /
Mexico border at Friendship Park. We created the
short film “A Prayer Beyond Borders” about these
gatherings that has spread across the United States
through our film as we have been invited to talk about
this work around the world. In connecting diverse
faith communities to protect families who have been
separated by US immigration policies we have created
one of the only places in the world where Muslims
and Christians share religious services together.

This is Muslim led community organizing work, in

alliance with diverse communities that models how
Muslims and progressive allies can come together to
create change at both a local and national level.

As we enter 2020 we are also continuing the legacy

work of CAIR California with our team of lawyers
while strengthening the resources we can provide
for our community. In building a powerful and strong
community we understand that youth organizing
is key to the potential of our community as Muslim
youth have been at the center of the Islamophobia our
community has faced over the last two decades and
they are ready to build political power strategically.
With this in mind we are expanding our youth
programmatic offerings in 2020 to build a robust civic
engagement program for the election, we are hosting
the first Muslim day at San Diego City Hall, and we

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CAIR San Diego
Know One Another: Our Call to End
Racism and Islamophobia in Our World
In our world, full of diversity and beauty Allah
has called us in the Qur’an to “know one another.”
What matters most is not our differences, but our
character and actions on this earth. This is a call to
put understanding and belonging at the center of our
existence. In a time of so much disharmony, we must
lead in bringing people together in ending racism,
Islamophobia, and white supremacy in our world.
To “know one another” is deep transformational work
that takes commitment, patience, and understanding,
across all communities. This is intergenerational work
that takes all of us leading with open hearts and
deep intentionality. It is with this in mind that we are
attempting to organize against Islamophobia in key
parts of San Diego.
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While our legal work responds to Islamophobia in
classrooms with school bullying, in the workplace
against discrimination and with hate crimes happening
in the city. We have to become more strategic in
how we respond more broadly to Islamophobia. This
is why we are focused on leadership development
for congregation based organizing at Mosques and
ally institutions. With this we are building a set of
coalitions with the racial justice coalition, through
our East County coalition, and through our North
County organizing project. With this we are creating
frameworks for how racial justice lives in our cities
and how it is manifested at the policy levels, with a
major push for an office of racial equity in San Diego.

CAIR California The Last Line of
Defense for the Community
In 1994, American Muslims increasingly found
themselves the targets of growing anti-Muslim
sentiment and incidents of discrimination across the
nation. The CAIR founders stepped in at that critical
time and, with support from the Muslim community
and other minority and civil rights groups, launched an
organization to preserve our constitutional values and
to facilitate the integration of American Muslims into
the fabric of our society.
The Northern California office of CAIR-CA, now
known as the San Francisco Bay Area office, was
established with the founding location in Santa
Clara, following the opening of the CAIR National
Headquarters in Washington D.C. Three other offices
later opened, covering the greater Los Angeles area,
Sacramento Valley/Central California and San Diego.
CAIR-CA, initially founded by a group of volunteers,
has since grown to be recognized as a state leader
and champion of civil rights for all Americans, with
a particular focus on challenges faced by American
Muslims. Over the past 25 years, we have seen
countless challenges and victories because of your
support.
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CAIR San Diego
As we celebrate the 25th anniversary of CAIR-SFBA,
it is really an anniversary for CAIR-CA. In this quarter-
century of existence in California, we have continued
to protect the civil liberties of American Muslims,
educate our community, empower our youth and
build coalitions that enhance the understanding of
Islam. As we look back on 2018, we are proud to share
some of our major victories: efforts by CAIR-CA and
its partners to push legislation, signed into law by
Gov. Brown, to protect our children from bullying in
schools and encourage immigrant entrepreneurship;
standing in solidarity with faith leaders and activists
in support of asylum seekers and refugees; and
expanded services throughout the state.
We are proud of the work we have accomplished
and look forward to continuing our service to our
community through CAIR-CA’s four offices: Greater
Los Angeles (CAIR-LA), Sacramento Valley/Central
Valley (CAIR-SV/CC), San Diego (CAIR-SD) and San
Francisco Bay Area (CAIR-SFBA).
Vision 2020
CAIR San Diego
Do Not Spy: Ending Surveillance on
the Muslim Community
Over the last eighteen years the American Muslim
community has been targeted by one of the largest
counterintelligence programs in the history of
the United States. This issue of surveillance is
foundational for the American Muslim community
and other communities of color because it is broadly
impacting our engagment in the civic life of this
country from voting to engagement in community
organizing.
This surveillance today is made up of layers of
information collected by local police departments
working with Customs & Border patrol, ICE, and
the FBI including through the Joint Terrorism Task
Force (JTTF), and numerous other agencies. Mother
Jones magazine and Al Jazeera have run investigative
reports about the 15,000 informants working with the
FBI within Muslim communities across the country
today.
On top of this lies an emerging technological
surveillance state that turns streetlights into
surveillance hubs that capture video and audio
and that could add license plate readers or facial
recognition technology with simple software updates.
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Technology like this, developed by companies in the
United States, is being sold to China and used to
police Uyghur Muslim populations facing the largest
mass internment since WWII. On top of this lies
our data on social media platforms where Russian
bots posed as fake Muslims as part of the voter
suppression efforts in the 2016 election.
These layers of surveillance have created an
environment of distrust amongst many Muslims,
leading some to become fearful to join any political
movements. These verses in the Quran come right
before the verses where God is calling on humanity to
know one another (49:13) because if we spy on one
another and speak behind each other’s back we will
never be able to join together in unity to fight against
the evil forces in our world.
Here, in San Diego over the last two years the city has
proudly built what it calls the United States largest
“smart cities platform.” This technology was sold
to the city council by General Electric for its green
tech and data collection for city planning purposes.
Unfortunately, it also had a hidden agenda, that was
never mentioned in public debate. Each of these smart
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street lights now under direct control of the San Diego

Police Department have video, and audio surveillance Our Call to Pray
Beyond Borders
systems with data nodes that can collect information
about our offline lives. CAIR San Diego has worked
with 40 local community organizations to build the
TRUST San Diego coalition to take on this hidden
surveillance system and to demand a moratorium be
& The Building
put in place on the usage, installation, and acquisition
of these streetlights. the Border Mosque
We have also asked that the city develop a Our call to pray beyond borders started with a humble
comprehensive surveillance policy similar to the city gathering in Friendship Park on the US/ Mexico
of Oaklands. This would include a privacy advisory border of San Diego and Tijuana. A group of Muslims
commission, a transparency ordinance that would and Christians gathered to pray together in parallel
govern how the San Diego Police Department ceremonies on each side of one of the world’s most
acquires smart city surveillance technology, and a ban militarized international borders. The sea met below
on the use of facial recognition tech throughout the us, just past the reach of the fence, as did our hearts
city. We have also asked the hard questions about this connected by a love for God and a deep desire to
so called smart cities platform. Who exactly was it transform the humanitarian crisis that surrounds us.
that designed this system? That if fully implemented
would disproportionately impact communities of color
like City Heights, Logan Heights, and Southeast San
Diego. In researching the placement of these street
lights we also found that they are placed around the
majority of Mosques in the city.

This is a system that is seen as a testing ground for

all of San Diego County, and cities like New Orleans,
Atlanta, and New York City who are all testing similar
platforms, but on a much smaller scale. Join us as we
build transformational work to live into these verses
and end surveillance in Muslim and other Black and
Brown communities.

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To break down barriers we have to first start with
the borders in our minds and hearts, and the borders
within our communities and families. If we break
down the walls between us then no iron or steel can
stop our hearts from being connected. Prayer is not
confined to dimensions of existence, let alone man-
made borders, so answer this call and pray with us.

From this humble gathering we believe we have

opened up one of the most important relationships
between the Christian and Muslim community in the
world. While we have invited in other faith groups and
we pray that others join us in this call, the core groups

have been Muslim and Christian leaders. Together our
faith communities make up more than 50% of humanity as
the two largest religious groups on this earth. We know of
no other place on this earth where.
Breaking Down the
Border & Barriers
in Our Hearts at the
US / Mexico Border
By Rev. John Fanestil & Imam Taha Hassane (Originally
Published by the Christian Post)
Since November 2011 a faithful group of Christians
have gathered for a weekly celebration of communion
at Friendship Park, celebrating the sacrament and
sharing bread and cup on both sides of the border wall.
By the moving of the Spirit, and through the work of a
remarkable team of leaders on the Mexican side of the
border wall, this practice has given birth to an ongoing
community of faith that calls itself The Border Church /
La Iglesia Fronteriza. It is the only community in San Diego
where each week people standing in two nations share
the Christian sacrament of communion together.
For years, people have gathered at Friendship Park in
San Diego. A place where borders, and friends, coincide.
At the center of Friendship Park stands a historic stone
monument, the first in a long line of markers that were
first put in place in the 1850s, in the aftermath of the
US-Mexico War, to demarcate the new international
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boundary. Even as the U.S. federal government
has erected more and more barriers – first
barbed wire, then a fence, then a wall, then a
double wall – across the face of the historic
meeting place, folks gather every week to join in
prayer and meeting with loved ones.
Today, San Diego Border Patrol officials allow
limited numbers of the public to access the
primary border wall in the United States. The
American public is only allowed to visit the
border wall on weekends, from 10 am to 2
pm on Saturdays and Sundays, year-round.
A festival-like atmosphere prevails on the
Mexican side of the border during “visiting
hours,” despite the physical barriers and harmful
rhetoric directly affecting their communities.
Public access is not restricted on the Mexican
side of the border, but people look forward
to the few hours allotted to interacting with
family and friends through the border wall.
Through ordinary acts of love, kindness and
prayer, people have sustained families, forged
friendships and practiced their faith across the
US-Mexico border.
Since the early 2000s, U.S. politicians and
government officials have entertained the
fantastical notion that the United States should
somehow be entirely “walled off” from Mexico.
The rise in hateful rhetoric can be attributed to
changes in American society and anti-Mexican
xenophobia that has moved to the forefront of
American public life. Even as fear has shaped
U.S. border policy, and informed so much of the
public discourse about the border, people who
live along the border have continued to build
bridges of peace and understanding, despite
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CAIR San Diego

perceived dividing lines of race, class, language, culture,

nationality and religion.

Starting this past April of 2019, a faithful group of Muslims

also began to gather regularly at Friendship Park. Calling
themselves The Border Mosque, these faithful people
perform the Islamic call to prayer, and the mid afternoon
salah (prayer) on the Mexican side of the wall before the
start of the Border Church celebration. Christians and
Muslims are praying together, respectfully observing each
other’s religious rituals,building extraordinary friendships
over a shared meal.

This sharing of public space that sits at the heart of

controversy, the US-Mexico border wall, has now been
captured spectacularly in a new film, “A Prayer Beyond
Borders.” Inspired by the new film, we have chosen to
declare October 27, A Binational Day of Prayer. A day of
reflection, celebration, and prayer for forgiveness for the
divisions that plague our world and pray for a renewed
spirit of friendship and harmony among all people.
Prayer, friendship, family, faith – these things invite us all
to create a world beyond borders.

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Building Mosque Rooted Congregation
Based Organizing Throughout San
Diego County
Our communities theory of how we make change
has shifted over the years. As a small minority
community not deeply connected to politics, power,
or institution building it made sense to use media
and public relations models to tell our story. Today
as a larger community that is deeply connected to
politics, power, and community institutions it makes
sense to shift to a more direct model of community
power building through Mosque based organizing
with diverse alliances. In the interfaith funders report
Building Bridges, Building Power: Developments
in Institution-Based Community Organizing it was
reported that Mosques represent only 1% of the 4500
total member institutions that make up the ecology of
the Congregation Based Organizing (CBO) field. This
does not mean that Muslim communities have not
been organizing for decades with the likes of Malcolm
X, the Nation of Islam, and Warrith Dean Muhammad
communities leading the way in the 1950s, 60s, and
70s. Starting in the early 1990s up to today a number
of organizations led by the Inner-city Muslim Action
Network in Chicago, Desi’s Rising Up and Moving
(DRUM), MPower Change, and the CAIR Network
and many others have built powerful, though often
underfunded work around a number of important
issues within the Muslim and larger AMEMSA
community. However, most of this work was not led
through a congregation based organizing model.
Over the last fifteen years, our executive director,
Dustin Craun has worked to build Muslim organizing
across the state of California and the United States
that has deepened our relationships to key Muslim
clergy, faith leaders and Mosques. The Muslim
community lives at the center of a number of social
injustices that affect people throughout the United
States broadly, ranging from mass incarceration in
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the United States, to immigration struggles similar to
many communities, to the laser focus of racial and
religious profiling of the surveillance state on the
Muslim community (by the NSA, FBI, as well as local
police departments such as the NYPD), as well as
global war and drone warfare within the countries
where many American-Muslims are from.
We are working to deepen this model of organizing
with CAIR San Diego rooted in the values of our faith.
For us this work is rooted in a chapter of the Qur’an
called The Quarters where God speaks of the divine
purpose of the diversity we live within in our world,
“People, We created you from a single man and a
single woman, and made you into races and tribes
so that you should recognize one another. In God’s
eyes, the most honored of you are the ones most
mindful of Him: God is all knowing, all aware.” (49:13).
These words in the Arabic language Li Taarifu mean
to recognize or to know one another is about truly
seeing each others humanity within the divine light we
are all born into.
It is interesting that just a few lines before these
words in the same chapter of the Qur’an are the lines
that the Muslim community had printed on signs and
held at the Oakland city council meeting, “Do not
spy on one another.” As God is warning us here if
we spy on another, if we back bite and speak badly
about one another, we ultimately create mistrust,
stereotypes, and misunderstandings of one another.
Misunderstandings, prejudices, and racism which
can create hatred between people and keep us from
living into and understanding the divine purpose of
our diversity and differences across race, gender,
nationality, and religion.
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Multi-faith organizing forces us to be in relationship

with one another so that all of our families, can live
dignified lives together as we take on the great triple
evils that Martin Luther King warned us of at the end
of his life of poverty, racism, and war. As the great
Muslim poet Amir Sulaiman reminds us in his piece
“Come to the Hills (We Must Win)” it is not a question
or a choice for us to work on these issues, this is a
matter of life and death for many of our communities,
and “We must win.”

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Muslim Youth Organizing from the City

Hall to the Election Booth
Most people don’t get it, and maybe we didn’t believe
it until we saw it with our own eyes but Muslims in the
US and around the world are majority under 23. This
is the generation that will build the community that
will become the largest religious group on the planet
by 2070 making up more than 1/3rd of humanity,
according to pew surveys. India and Indonesia will be
the largest Muslim populations in the world.

Islamophobia cannot be a permanent reality we have

to get busy building relationships with one another
across borders, across faiths, across ideologies and
we have to learn how to deeply care for and love one
another to so we start focusing on the most serious
issues of our times. We have to be deeply committed
in each of our lives to ending war, climate change and
dismantling white supremacy and racism in the world
and in our hearts. Our prayer is to be a servant of
this generation of global youth and the good they are
building in the world.

In building a powerful and strong community we

understand that youth organizing is key to the
potential of our community as Muslim youth have
been at the center of the Islamophobia our community
has faced over the last two decades and they are
ready to build political power strategically. With this
in mind we are expanding our youth programmatic
offerings in 2020 to build a robust civic engagement
program for the election, we are hosting the first
Muslim day at San Diego City Hall, and we will be
hosting the Muslim Game Changers Network in San
Diego for the first time. The program is aimed at
Muslim youth, and features a series of interactive
workshops using core Islamic principles of justice
and compassion to teach youth how to engage
government and local communities in order to create
social change.

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Testing a New Culture of Innovation

& Building Narrative Infrastructure
Within CAIR California
Nonprofits are not generally known to be places of equipped, motivated and networked.
innovation but in a time when journalism is being
destroyed by pay walls and nearly 70% of digital 3. 3. We cannot forsake the power of brands — the
advertising is being sold to Google, Facebook, relationships responsible for the way that most
and Amazon it is more important than ever that people come to change their thinking, reshape
organizations have deep expertise in telling their their feeling and redirect their behaviors.
own stories. Rashad Robinson, the executive director
and founder of the digital native online organizing
In following the above logic, in building narrative
platform, Color of Change has written about the
infrastructure and brand shifting within CAIR we
need to develop narrative infrastructure within
started with these five goals for this work at CAIR San
movements. To develop this narrative infrastructure
Diego:
we must understand that this is not the same as
communications and public relations expertise.
1. Develop a culture of innovation and testing
Robinson writes, in his paper, “Changing the Narrative
within our chapter to challenge the CAIR
about Narrative,”
network to try out ideas at the local level before
a possible role out nationally.
“Narrative infrastructure is singularly about
equipping a tight network of people organizing
2. We deployed an outside / inside strategy by
on the ground and working within various
focusing on the issues locally that have national
sectors to develop strategic and powerful
meaning, in this case the US/ Mexico border and
narrative ideas, and then, against the odds of
surveillance, with film production focused on
the imbalanced resources stacked against us,
issues that CAIR San Diego is working on rather
immerse people in a sustained series of narrative
than CAIR itself. Within this strategy we also
experiences required to enduringly change
used our own content production, to then lead
hearts, minds, behaviors and relationships.”
a PR campaign around our film, and the work
featured in the film. This allowed us to explore
To do this work, Robinson states we need to do three
the unique ways that public narrative shifting
things to change our orientation towards narrative.
work and public relations strategy can work
together.
1. We need the ability to follow-through
on narrative and cultural dispersion and 3. Design that is pushing the CAIR brand in a new
immersion — over time, across segments and at direction but that is respectful of institutional
scale. anxiety around not changing the logo for now.

2. 2. We need actual human beings to serve 4. We developed a theme for our 2020 vision,
as our main vehicle for achieving narrative “Build & Defend Our Future” and campaign
change — people who are authentic, talented,

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specific branding so we can easily communicate
the core areas we are working on to our
community, and donors.
5. We tested digital campaigns through
partnerships with MPower Change and MoveOn
that would give us access to existing digital
campaigns list to grow our own digital campaigns
work long term.
6. We also led a conversation within the CAIR
National network at the annual CAIR conference
where Dustin Craun presented on Narrative
infrastructure, emphasizing the core differences
between communications and narrative strategy.
In building this culture and brand shifting work it was
important for us to use a combination of strong social
justice language, with strong imagery, and a new
design aesthetic that would shift the brand in new
directions. We have started testing this work with key
narrative shifting tools through design, film making,
and digital campaigns partnerships.
imagining what a Muslim presence would look like. We
began using this key phrase, “Pray Beyond Borders,”
as the core campaign theme that touched on prayer
as a binational and multi dimensional reality. We also
began using language about the borders in our hearts
and minds that lead to the manifestation of these
physical borders, themes that became central in the
film we would produce. This came through clearly in
our first design for this campaign by Qasim Arif, which
lead us into our first Muslim service in April.
At this first joint Border Church / Border Mosque
service we commissioned a binational film crew with
15 members to shoot the service on both sides of
the border with a team also crossing with the Muslim
community into Tijuana. The direction from the film
makers Ala’ Khan & Reynaldo Escoto was clear in
attempting to capture the “Gods eye view” of the
Border where no barrier exists. We did this through
film making focused on the spiritual nature of the
service through close up shots of the participants, and
the contrasts on both sides of the border with central
drone shots that allowed the camera to pass over the
border.

As Dustin Craun moved to San Diego in January of

This turned into our film, “A Prayer Beyond Borders”
2019, we began thinking about a critical narrative
which screened at international film festivals, and
intervention at the US / Mexico border, and we
at the border wall in Tijuana and was distributed by
imagined having a binational prayer at the Border.
MoveOn, MPower Change, and CAIR National.
We soon learned about the more than a decade of
The film is also a total departure from anything
work of the Border Church who have been holding
produced previously within the CAIR network as it
services at Friendship Park on the US / Mexico border
features no CAIR leaders and instead focuses on the
at Friendship Park, the only place on the border where
powerful stories of our work at the border. The film
families who have been separated by US immigration
ends with the CAIR logo, a reality more powerful than
policies can meet.
featuring CAIR in the film as it shows we have the
expertise to produce something of this caliber focused
We began attending Border Church service and
on narrative shifting. The film produces critical

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narrative interventions by featuring authentic Muslim

and Christian voices in unison focused on justice,
while also featuring Latina Muslims throughout the
film.

With the six month anniversary of Border Mosque

services we also conducted our first truly binational
prayer with Imam Omar Suleiman leading the prayer in
the US while a large group followed in Mexico on the
other side of the border wall.

Perhaps most importantly at a local level this has

turned into what some have called one of the most
critical Muslim / Christian relationships in the world
as we have held screenings and conversations about
this work in Mosques and Churches to discuss the
crisis at our border. What’s especially unique about
this relationship is the sacred space we are creating
for separated families at the US / Mexico border is
not conversational but instead two binational faith
communities worshiping together and praying for
an end to the madness happening on the Southern
border.

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Over the last year this narrative shifting

work has led to CAIR San Diego being
featured in more than 100 national,
international, and local press outlets

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