A Palestinian Immigrant Family's Legacy Becomes a Scholarship for Chicago's Next Generation of Nonprofit Leaders

In the south suburbs of Chicago, a scholarship fund quietly launched this year is tracing a straight line from one immigrant family's values to the next generation of community leaders. The Taha Family Scholarship Fund, established by longtime Chicagoland advocate Nareman Taha and administered through the Center for Arab American Philanthropy (CAAP), will award students pursuing careers in nonprofit leadership, community development, and social work, with grants ranging from $2,500 to $5,000. Taha, who was raised in Chicago and New York City in a Palestinian household, has spent more than two decades building one of the region's most prominent immigrant-serving institutions. In 2001, she co-founded Arab American Family Services (AAFS) alongside Itedal Shalabi, starting an organization that has since grown into a cornerstone of social services for Arab American and broader immigrant communities across the south suburbs. According to Crain's Chicago Business, which named Taha among its notable leaders in philanthropy, AAFS now operates roughly 60 programs with a staff of 75 and an $8 million annual budget, serving more than 20,000 people a year. The new scholarship fund is a personal project layered on top of that institutional legacy. CAAP, a program of ACCESS (the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services), describes the fund as inspired by the belief Taha's own parents held in the power of education — a belief she is now formalizing into a recurring source of support for students who might not otherwise have a direct path into nonprofit careers.　Unlike scholarships tied strictly to GPA or test scores, the Taha fund asks applicants to demonstrate financial need and a documented commitment to community-serving work, whether through volunteering, campus organizing, or prior service roles. Fields of study explicitly named include nonprofit leadership and management and the behavioral sciences, though CAAP's eligibility language leaves room for students in adjacent majors who can show a clear career trajectory toward public service. Eligibility is open to any student enrolled or planning to enroll at an accredited Illinois college or university, regardless of race, religion, nationality, or citizenship status — a deliberately broad frame that mirrors the mission of AAFS itself, which has never limited its client base to any single ethnic or religious group despite its founding roots in the Arab American community. Recipients will be required to provide career outcome data after graduation, a structure CAAP uses across several of its namesake funds to track whether its investment in students translates into sustained careers in the nonprofit sector. The fund adds to a growing list of philanthropic vehicles CAAP has stood up in recent years on behalf of Arab American families and community figures, part of a broader pattern of first- and second-generation immigrant leaders in Chicago converting personal wealth and reputational capital into structured, recurring community investment rather than one-time gifts. For a region where AAFS has already demonstrated what one organization built from scratch in 2001 can become two decades later, the scholarship represents an attempt to seed the next version of that story — one classroom and one graduate at a time.