The Mainstay Foundation
Shia Muslim Professionals
Conference
Engage 2026
Engage.Collaborate.Advance.
October 03, 2026
Bint Jebail Cultural Center · Dearborn, MI
The day runs in parallel tracks. Sessions boxed together share a start time. Pick one from each group.
Conference vision & structure
ENGAGE 2026 is the next chapter of The Mainstay Foundation’s longstanding ENGAGE Conference. For the past decade, ENGAGE has given leaders and representatives of Shia Islamic centers and organizations a dedicated space to meet, learn from one another, discuss common challenges, and strengthen relationships among institutions across the country.
That experience remains an essential part of ENGAGE. At the same time, ENGAGE 2026 widens the room, welcoming Shia Muslim professionals, entrepreneurs, educators, healthcare professionals, lawyers, students, and emerging leaders from across the country into a broader national professional gathering.
The conference is therefore designed around complementary experiences under one roof: the Administrators Forum, the Shia Muslim Professionals Conference, and the Student Leadership Forum.
Experience One
The Administrators Forum
The Administrators Forum preserves the core experience upon which ENGAGE was built. Registered representatives of Islamic centers and community organizations participate in dedicated programming throughout the day, focused on the challenges and opportunities facing Shia institutions in America.
Administrator sessions emphasize substantive discussion, peer learning, relationship-building, and the exchange of successful practices among centers and organizations nationally. The proposed priorities include governance, organizational sustainability, public safety, volunteer development, technology, data-driven decision-making, and institutional growth, reflecting the objective of building a national peer network of administrators who support and learn from one another.
The Forum operates as a conference within the broader conference, with its own dedicated room and programming throughout the day.
Experience Two
The Shia Muslim Professionals Conference
Alongside the Administrators Forum, ENGAGE 2026 introduces a broader national gathering of Shia Muslim professionals. Rather than treating each professional network as an entirely separate conference, ENGAGE brings these communities together as parts of a larger Shia Muslim professional ecosystem.
The morning emphasizes substantive, industry-focused programming, allowing attendees to engage conversations relevant to their professions and interests. The afternoon transitions toward professional development, transferable skills, interdisciplinary engagement, leadership, and community impact.
Professional attendees are encouraged to participate in sessions connected to their respective industries in order to strengthen relationships within those networks. However, with the exception of the dedicated Administrators Forum, professional sessions remain open across disciplines. This allows an attorney to join an entrepreneurship conversation, an educator to attend an AI workshop, a physician to explore leadership development, or a student to begin building relationships with professionals who may become future mentors.
Experience Three
The Student Leadership Forum
The Student Leadership Forum gives university student leaders a track of their own rather than a seat at the back of someone else’s. Student organizations carry real responsibility across campuses nationally: running programming, representing the community to their institutions, and holding a generation together through the years when many step away. They do it with almost no institutional support and a leadership turnover of three or four years.
Student sessions therefore concentrate on the problems that structure actually causes. The morning addresses leading a body of volunteers, the way identity shapes how a young leader is heard, and building an organization that survives the graduation of the people who built it. The afternoon turns outward, putting students directly in front of professionals from every network in the one hour of the day designed for that purpose.
The intent is continuity. A student who attends ENGAGE should leave holding specific relationships rather than general encouragement, and should recognize the conference as somewhere they will return: first as a mentee, later as one of the professionals other students come to meet.
Across all three
One Conference Community
Although ENGAGE provides dedicated spaces for different constituencies, the conference is intentionally designed to bring attendees together throughout the day. All attendees participate together in lunch, congregational prayer, the afternoon opening, the Closing Plenary, and the conference closing.
The day culminates with the Excellence in Service Scholarship Dinner, bringing conference attendees and members of the broader community together to celebrate service, recognize scholarship recipients, and invest in the next generation.
The objective is twofold: an administrator who has attended ENGAGE for years should continue receiving the substantive, relationship-driven experience that has defined the conference, while a professional attending for the first time should leave having experienced something new: a national gathering of Shia Muslim professionals connected by faith, professional excellence, service, and a shared investment in the future of our community.