On July 16, 2026, Murmuration brought together leaders, organizers, creators, and journalists at The Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice for America 251 & Beyond, a forward-looking conversation about the kind of America we want to build over the next 250 years. Across seven lightning talks exploring belonging, community, joy, identity, agency, nation, and hope, speakers Murmuration’s Chief Research Officer Sarah Stamper, Alex Johnston, Amanda Litman, Cord Jefferson, Astead Herndon, Daria Dawson, Murad Awawdeh, and Jason Green offered distinct perspectives on the people, relationships, and communities that shape American civic life. Together, their reflections challenged us to look beyond the current moment and imagine what becomes possible when we invest in the conditions that allow communities to thrive.
About Murad Awawdeh
Nationally acclaimed strategist and organizer, Murad Awawdeh has been leading the charge for immigrants across New York & the nation. Murad, the son of Palestinian immigrants, has dedicated over two decades of his life fighting for low-income communities of color. As the President and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC), he leads the nation's oldest and largest immigrant rights organization. Through his work, he has successfully expanded rights and protections for New Yorkers and delivered over $10 billion in community reinvestment.
Murad has been tapped by Governor Hochul to support post-COVID Recovery efforts to pave a new way forward for our city and state. Over the past two years, he has worked to welcome tens of thousands of recent arrivals, advocate for their needs, and strengthen the ecosystem of community organizations serving immigrant communities. Murad has successfully led electoral, legislative, and policy campaigns at the federal, state, and local levels and mobilized hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers at demonstrations against anti-immigrant policies.
As the President and CEO of NYIC Action, the NYIC's sister 501(c)4 political advocacy and action organization, he has successfully run grassroots electoral campaigns to elect progressive candidates. Murad has been featured in the New York Times, Vice, Washington Post, and various other outlets. He serves as a member of the Justice 2020 Committee, as a board member of the National Immigration Law Center, Advocacy Institute, National Partnership for New Americans, Fair Immigration Reform Movement, ImmigrantArc, and as Commissioner of the New York City Civic Engagement Commission.
Continue reading for the full transcript
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Thank you and good evening, everyone. My name is Murad Awawdeh, and I am with the New York Immigration Coalition. But I want you guys to take that away from me for a moment. Because I often think about the ways in which we already bias our thought process before we hear anything. Depending on who's speaking, how they're speaking, what is their cadence? How are they delivering what they are saying? And I often speak at rallies and not necessarily to people sitting down in front of me. So this is a little bit odd for me as well.
I am someone who should not be alive today. I was born in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, to a beautiful immigrant mother who did not know the language, did not know anything, but knew something was wrong when she went to the hospital, when she was pregnant with me, and she couldn't explain it to the doctors. They didn't have translation services.
By the grace of God, a random patient came in who was having an asthma attack. After they received their treatment, they were like, “What's wrong?” to my mother in Arabic, and she was able to become my mom's translator. After my mom sat there for two and a half hours without getting care, they rushed her into an operating room and realized I had the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck for some time, and we're hoping that I'd be OK.
So I stand before you as my mother's miracle child, one of seven, who thinks about the ways in which we all show up—and not in the performative way, but the way that you show up when no one's actually looking.
I'm from this neighborhood called Sunset Park, where, in the 80s and 90s, it was not what it is today. It was a beautiful community, and what made it beautiful was not its infrastructure, which was definitely not the park or the new waterfront park. It was its people.
On my block was a community filled with people who were Palestinian like myself, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans. People who came to this neighborhood looking to find a way forward in life. We never asked each other about our papers because papers didn't matter on the block. What mattered was our food.
People would come to our window and be like, “What you cookin’? It smells really good.” And we would be like, “Yo, that smells amazing. What is that?” and we would share dishes.
My mom played a maqluba for mofongo, giving you just a glimpse of community, knowing that sometimes mofongo can be made with pork rinds. Your neighbor knowing that you don't eat pork and going out of their way to make mofongo without pork rinds just tells you all you need to know about building community block by block.
For me, looking at the way in which we built community on our block and then built it block by block to fight back against what we knew was making us all sick, what we knew we were not receiving from our government.
The organizing that took place—which we didn't call organizing back then—was fixing the problems of our neighbor so that we were able to have the conversations we needed to with one another. The block taught me more about nation-building than the history books did.
For 250 years, America has had two stories about itself at the same exact time, and they're both contradictory. The first is America wants you to give them your tired, your poor, those yearning for freedom—and the other story is writing laws that excluded people. Those two stories, for every generation, have gone to war with each other.
Here's the thing that history tells us: the wider story always wins. And that's not easy. It's not quick. Every single time America has become more itself, it’s by becoming more of us.
My parents came here with very little. They actually crashed on my uncle and aunt's floor with my older siblings for some time until they were able to save up money to rent their own place. They came here and raised seven kids. I think most of us are doing well, for the most part. And now one of their children stands before you speaking to people about what the future of this country looks like when they came here with their own future for this country, which was their children.
Now I run one of the largest immigrant rights organizations in the United States, one at the forefront of the fight against what we are seeing today. For those who don't know what it's actually called, it's fascism and authoritarianism.
But I'm standing here because the promise of this country isn't dead. It's under construction. And it always has been. We keep asking the wrong questions of who belongs in America. As if belonging is a sacred resource. And it never has been.
We think about the scarcity of something we never had to engage in when it was other communities here. We act as if there aren't enough seats at the table in this country when there's more than enough seats. But a nation isn't a table. It's a barn, and we're barn raising. It's getting bigger every time someone new picks up a hammer. It's the question for the next 250. Is it who gets to belong here? It's what could we build if everyone did?
And New York is its proof of concept. And I'm not trying to poop on anyone else's town or pi** in anyone's punch, but New York to me is New York or nowhere forever. Knicks in Five. New York, I don't have to imagine that country that I'm thinking of. New York is it already.
And I know that we are not perfect here. We are far from it. But one thing New York is is its beauty and its people. And I work here every single day with 200 organizations. People who work with hundreds of languages, farm workers upstate, street vendors in Corona, Queens, and nurses on Staten Island. People who chose this place and, more importantly, chose each other. New York isn't the exception to America. New York could be its preview. In 2026, we all just saw the Celebrate 250 in the harbor. We saw the ships. We saw the party that flared out in D.C. We saw the amazingness of what could be and what we are today.
And anniversaries tempt us to always look backward. I'd rather us all look as if this 250 is groundbreaking and not a birthday. Because if we're all here together and we all got our shovels, imagine that.
We're breaking ground together on this new next 250. The possibilities are just endless.
This is not a finished nation. It's just getting started. Every generation has poured another foundation, another frame, another wall, and opened another door.
So my hope for the next 250 is that we stop treating belonging as something to defend and start treating it as something to extend. That we come first, the nation in human history, defined not by blood or border, but by the audacity of everyone who showed up ready to build. This nation isn't finished, and that's a good thing. That means it's still ours to make. Thank you.