By Lisa Deaderick
Born and raised in the Bay Area, Ramah Awad is the daughter of immigrants and the granddaughter of refugees, which she says helped informed the way she sees and understands the world and the kind of work she’s motivated to do in it.
“My grandparents, they’re the generation that lived through what we call the Palestinian Nakba — which means ‘catastrophe’ in Arabic — in 1948, which marked the largest-scale exile of Palestinians out of Palestine … so my grandparents survived the nakba,” she says. “I think that experience has really shaped how I understand the world today. Coming from that history of displacement and exile made me very aware of issues relating to refugee rights, and also understanding that that was a grave injustice. As a granddaughter of refugees, what is my role to play in addressing those injustices? How does that tie into an ongoing advocacy?”
Part of the answer has been in her work as executive director of the Majdal Arab Community Center of San Diego, which works with refugee communities who’ve “undergone similar injustices” by providing advocacy, cultural programs, political engagement, resources, and community connection for members of San Diego’s Arab community. Because of her work to support and uplift refugee and immigrant communities, she’s been recognized as a 2025 recipient of the Nancy Jamison Fund for Social Justice Award. Jamison was president and CEO of Catalyst of San Diego and Imperial Counties, a collective of organizations, businesses, and individuals connected with groups and programs focused on social change; she died in 2021. Awad, along with fellow recipient Pedro Rios, director of the U.S.-Mexico Border Program at the American Friends Service Committee, will each receive an unrestricted $50,000 grant to advance their work. She took some time to talk about her commitment to the rights of immigrants and refugees, and making life smoother and more equitable for their communities. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. )
Q: You earned a bachelor’s in history with a minor in anthropology from Stanford University in 2017, researching the Middle East, social movements, and refugee rights. Can you talk about what led you to focus on and pursue a career in this area?
A: I think it starts a lot with growing up as a Palestinian and becoming very aware of what injustice looks like on a global scale. When I got to college, I was looking to understand more of the world order and what led us to certain political moments that inform our current realities. History was one of those disciplines and departments at Stanford that offered a deeper analysis and offered context to everything that we’re seeing today. Granted, any academic discipline is limited, but history as a field equips me with more of those frameworks and the knowledge to analyze the past so that I could be a stronger advocate in the present. Anthropology was, for me, another critical field because it gave me ways to understand power, and it gave me ways to understand how society is working. So, those two academic interests led me to an honors thesis focused on Palestinian refugees who were fleeing Syria.
I was looking at their journeys of fleeing Syria, temporarily settling in Turkey or Jordan, and then eventually claiming asylum to be resettled in San Diego or the U.S. For me, I was really driven by questions of refugee rights, of how Palestinians are being included or excluded from international policies, specifically the global refugee regime. I was looking at questions of social identity, how borders work, how border violence enacts itself in different ways and what the impact is on people who are stateless, such as Palestinians, or people whose country is undergoing war or political turmoil. What happens when you no longer are safe in your country? What happens when you no longer have clear belonging to a nation, right? So, I was really curious about those more theoretical questions, and I was answering them by looking at the history of Palestinians being exiled from Syria, and why Syria didn’t move toward naturalizing Palestinians. They still maintained their Palestinian legal designation. Then, how that reverberated through ongoing moments of displacement. So, when Palestinians get to Europe, how are they being considered? I was able to go into the history of that and the field interviews I was doing offered me more insight into the on-the-ground, current-day realities of people who are seeking asylum and seeking safety, having been exiled from their countries of origin.
Q: Congratulations on receiving a 2025 Nancy Jamison Fund for Social Justice award. What does it mean to you to be recognized for your work in this way?
A: I’m deeply honored to have been recognized as one of two recipients. I was deeply moved to receive the news. I’m personally grateful and I think that it acknowledges the work and the leadership that I’ve demonstrated, but more importantly, I think that it highlights the communities that I work in and that I’m accountable to. For me, this feels like a moment of recognition for the communities—and, specifically, I’m thinking about the Middle Eastern, Arab, Muslim community—that is oftentimes not seen, for many different reasons. I take it as a great honor, on a personal level; for the community, I feel like it’s a way to bring more attention and really uplift the communities that that I work in.
Q: On the organization’s website, it talks about your work in getting a Middle Eastern and North African population category adopted by the San Diego Unified School District. Can you talk about what this category is?
A: For the longest time, Middle Eastern and North African residents across the U.S. have been classified under the White/Caucasian category. In U.S. census data, there’s not a distinct category for our communities as there is for other minority groups in the U.S., so when you go to check the census form every 10 years, there’s no Middle Eastern or North African category. What happens there is that that translates into all levels of government. You will find some agencies that have started to include MENA, but that hasn’t become a blanket, overall policy until last year, where the U.S. adopted the MENA category on the federal level. Our work as local advocates is to make sure that those measures are being implemented at all levels of public institutions. Part of why this is so critical is because if we’re not showing up in the data, it makes our work harder because we don’t have data on the exact number in our communities, we don’t have enough data on the socioeconomic standing of our communities in terms of income levels, education levels, even data on health issues within our communities have also been under studied because we’re not showing up in the data. So, the MENA category is critical because it starts to formalize our inclusion in the data, which is a first step to being able to get more resources for the community to better advocate for our community’s needs.
With the San Diego Unified School District, that’s one public institution that was very receptive to adopting a MENA measure. Then, last year, the County of San Diego also adopted a MENA resolution, and I believe it was the first county in California to adopt the MENA category, following the federal decision. Our work as community advocates is to make sure that these measures are actually implemented and that we can encourage our community to check Middle Eastern, North African on the forms. This would include all national groups and ethnicities within the Middle East and North Africa.
What we’re advocating for within the MENA category is to include major Middle Eastern groups, so that would include Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, also North African groups such as Algerian, Egyptian, Moroccan. There are also the transnational MENA groups that are across nations, or pertain to certain ethnic groups, so that would include Armenians, Assyrians, Chaldeans. Really, trying to be as expansive as possible to make sure that our communities are well represented in data. This is something that you would think would have existed, but it’s really only taken place in these past couple years, even though our communities have been advocating for this for decades. It’s exciting, I think this is a historical moment for our communities in the U.S., and hopefully it’s for the better and this data is used for good.
Q: Why was this categorization necessary? What kind of significance does achieving this hold?
A: I talked a little bit about the correlation between data and more resources for the community because, on a mass level, the census data is used to allocate public resources, right? So, there’s a direct correlation between being able to show up in the data, have an accurate count of the size of our communities, and there being public resources allocated proportionally.
I think the other piece of it is, when it comes to advocacy work or building power for our communities, we can now talk in terms of a voting right as a minority group in the U.S. I think our voting power has been undercounted, so I’m hopeful that this will lead to better voting power.
Q: When you imagine the kind of San Diego that is “a more equitable place for…refugees and immigrants,” what are some tangible ways you’d like to see that happen?
A: Yeah, that’s a great question. One of the biggest barriers that we see in the community is language barriers. What I see worsening those language barriers is the fact that there oftentimes aren’t enough Arabic speakers working within public institutions or hospitals or health clinics. I think one of the most tangible ways that that can be addressed is really by investing in the professional development of our communities so that we’re able to enter those professions and that there’s more representation from the community. I think more resources need to be allocated to training and hiring from our communities because I think that’s the best way to make sure that the institutions meant to serve our communities are actually culturally responsive and linguistically accessible for the communities we serve. I think language is a big one.
I think that the way that the resettlement process is set up in the U.S. is overly reliant on nonprofits. A lot of the families come through resettlement agencies, but due to the limited funding and the very strict parameters, the support only lasts for the first three months of a family’s resettlement. I think there needs to be more thought and more resources allocated to the resettlement process because, from what I’m seeing, it’s not realistic to expect that a family new to the U.S.-doesn’t speak the language, is adjusting to a whole new context, new systems, is probably still dealing with overcoming trauma from having experienced displacement and war in their home countries-to have them up on their feet in three months. I think we need to pay more attention to what that resettlement process is and, unfortunately, a lot of that is due to limited funding. When we talk about what can tangibly be done, it’s literally investing more resources and funds into supporting these families because the more we can set them up for success from the beginning, they have a higher chance of integrating into the U.S. and achieving self-sufficiency because they know where to go for certain services, they are becoming more comfortable with the language. So, I think of what more can government do to ensure that families are well received here?
To San Diego’s credit, there is a lot happening, but I do think that there’s still a need in the community. I would love to see some fund that is specifically for newcomer families, that they can access, whether that’s housing support, or just resources that can extend support for the communities while they’re getting on their feet. It feels like, oftentimes, they’re just thrown into the deep end and not offered enough support from the get-go. It really comes down to resourcing these families and these communities from their initial entry into the U.S. because I think that’s what would most set them up for success.
The other part is investing in the youth. That’s why, at Majdal, we have a big emphasis on youth because they have a very long runway to taking on the language, continuing their education, finding employment; so, how can we also invest in the youth in our community? That’s going to yield returns for the community, as a whole. I think investment in youth is really critical, and then investment more in the resettlement process for when families are coming to the U.S.