The Share Center is an example of social service and mutual aid that reflects MANA’s mission and vision, so we are highlighting our partners’ efforts. As we seek to develop the other 20+ dimensions of Mana’s mission and effort, as well as the networks they are representative of, we will be using our platform to highlight organizations doing beneficial work in those areas.
In 1978, after being displaced from one rented room after another, a small group of Muslims in Lexington finally had somewhere to pray that nobody could ask them to leave. It was a white building on the corner of Georgetown and Ash. It became the first masjid in Lexington and it was later named for Bilal ibn Rabah.
They rented it for twenty-three years before they could buy it. They took ownership in 2001.
Then they outgrew it. In 2004 the community bought property on Russell Cave Road, and in 2005 they moved. Which is normally where a story like this ends – a congregation gets bigger, moves up the road, and the old building is sold to whoever will take it.
They did not sell it.
In 2010 the building at 572 Georgetown Street opened again as the SHARE Center – Services for Human Advancement & Resource Enhancement. Today it holds a free medical clinic, a free dental clinic that opened this past June, a food bank, a fresh produce market, a community garden, and a desk where you can walk in on a weekday with no appointment and get help building a résumé and finding work.
What actually happens there
Saturday is the day. The medical clinic runs from eleven to three, staffed by volunteer physicians, nurses and medical students, handling chronic conditions, medication renewals, blood pressure, diabetes, referrals. The produce market runs eleven to two and people leave with bags of potatoes, tomatoes, cabbage – whatever came in that week. Lunch starts at noon. One meal per person, and they do not stop until they run out.
On weekdays the food bank is open and the job desk is staffed. No appointment. You come by and somebody sits with you.
Who it is for
Anyone in Lexington. SHARE’s own values statement is explicit: the goal is to help individuals, families and the community become self-sufficient and to provide tools and guidance so that people may become “healthy, whole, righteous human beings including all races, religions, and backgrounds.”
The neighbourhood around Georgetown Street is where the need is. The building is already there, and it has been there since 1978.
Why this one is different
Most service centres are organized around relief. SHARE is organized around work.
Their stated mission is worth reading closely: they want to “ensure the individual is not relying on the community but is applying their abilities and committed desires to become self-reliant,” and the primary way they pursue it is job placement. Volunteers find openings, then sit with people who come through the door and match them to the work. SHARE reports a success rate above fifty percent at getting clients into jobs.
The clinic and the food bank are not the mission. They are what makes the mission reachable for somebody who cannot look for work while sick, or hungry, or without a way to fill a prescription.
Employment-based, not charity-based. It is a distinction this network keeps arriving at from different directions, and here is a place that has been operating on it for sixteen years.
What it embodies
Khidma (service) is the obvious answer, and it is not the interesting one.
The interesting one is amānah (A trust) is something held on behalf of someone else, and the test of it is what you do when you no longer need the thing you were holding. This community waited twenty-three years to own a building. When they finally did, and then outgrew it, they had every ordinary reason to sell — and a congregation that had just committed to a new property had every ordinary use for the money.
Instead they handed the building to the neighbourhood and kept paying for it.
The building did not change its purpose when it stopped being a masjid. It changed its ẓāhir (appearance) . What it is outwardly is now a clinic and a food bank and a job desk. What it is inwardly is what it was in 1978: a room this community secured so that people who had nowhere to go would have somewhere to go.
The human story
Someone had to rent that room in 1978 knowing they might be asked to leave it, the way they had been asked to leave the last one.
Someone had to keep paying on it for twenty-three years before it was theirs.
Someone had to say, in a meeting in 2009 or 2010 that nobody filmed, that the old building should not be sold.
Someone has to be there at eleven on Saturday morning to open the door, and again the Saturday after that, and has been doing it for sixteen years.
For Dr. Ihsan Bagby – one of the founders of MANA, on this network’s board since 2001, a scholar who has spent thirty years studying the American mosque – that work looks like chairing the board of a social service centre on Georgetown Street in Lexington, Kentucky. He studies what mosques can be. He also opens one.
We rise by lifting others. — SHARE Kentucky
Somewhere right now
Somewhere right now, Muslims are running a free dental clinic out of the building where their grandparents prayed.
They are handing a bag of cabbage and potatoes to somebody who walked over from three streets away.
They are sitting with a man who has not had a job in a year and pulling up listings with him.
Not because they have everything figured out. Because forty-eight years ago somebody rented a room, and nobody since has been willing to let it close.
You might want to meet them.
What you can do
- Visit — 572 Georgetown Street, Lexington KY. Monday to Thursday 9–3, Saturday 11–3.
- Volunteer — SHARE takes clinicians, students, and anyone willing to serve. The sign-up form is on their Get Involved page. Eighteen and over independently; fifteen to seventeen with a guardian’s permission.
- Give — the donate link on sharelexington.org.
- Follow — @sharecenterlexington.
- Ask your own masjid the question this story asks: what do you own that the neighbourhood could be using?
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