What Zakat means in our community

Zakat is one of the Five Pillars of Islam, but for many Muslims, paying it well is harder than paying it at all. We give to a foundation, an imam, a charity we've heard of; we hope it lands somewhere appropriate; we move on. Rarely are we told how the funds were spent, on whom, and what changed.

At mupla, Zakat is held to a different standard.

How we work

Zakat funds are kept 100% separate from our general operations. They sit in a dedicated account, audited separately, and distributed by a committee that includes scholars, social workers, and community members, all of whom are unpaid for this work. We publish the full distribution every spring as part of our annual report.

Our committee works from the eight categories the Qur'an names in verse 9:60, the poor, the needy, those who collect and distribute Zakat, those whose hearts are to be reconciled, those in captivity, the indebted, those in the cause of Allah, and the traveler. Not every category applies in every community; ours tends to concentrate on the first two, plus debt relief and refugee support, which are the categories our neighbors most often need.

What we won't do

We won't:

• Take an administrative or overhead cut from Zakat funds. 100% goes to recipients.
• Use Zakat to fund programs we would be running anyway. If a program needs operating support, that comes from sadaqah, not from Zakat.
• Promise confidential recipients that we will. We anonymize names in our published reports so that the dignity of recipients is preserved.

What you can do

If you'd like to give Zakat this year, the simplest path is our donate page, the entire Zakat tier is processed through a committee-approved distribution schedule, usually within 30 days of receipt. If your situation is more specific (an orphan to sponsor, a refugee family you've identified, a debt you'd like to help resolve), email us at zakat@mupla.org and we'll walk through what we can do together.

For everything beyond Zakat, recurring support, capital projects, in-kind gifts, our other programs describe how those funds work. The accounting is published annually, with line items.