About Us

Elmahaba Center was founded and incorporated as a 501(c)3 non-profit organization in June 2019 to serve Arabic-speaking immigrants—of the most underserved communities in Nashville, Tennessee, despite the increasing amount of Arabic-speaking peoples calling Nashville home. Nashville is known as Little Kurdistan and also, to the thousands of Copts, as Little Minya (in reference to a major southern city in Egypt called El-Minya).

Among Arabic-speaking immigrants, there is a vast diversity of dialects, regional homelands, religions and sects, ethnicities, immigration statuses, ages, etc. Nashville is home to thousands of Copts (Egyptian Christians), Iraqi Kurds, Syrian Kurds, Iraqi Arabs (Muslim and Christian), Yemeni Arabs, and now Syrian Arabs (Muslim and Christian). Despite those differences, Arabic gathers and creates intersects.

At Elmahaba Center, the majority of our board, staff, and volunteers speak and understand Arabic and English, and the majority have experience in service and community-building from before incorporation. In essence, we have three tenants: culture is community is care. We mean that by respecting cultures and meet people where they are, communities build themselves, and those communities, in turn, offer care to one another. When developing programming, we ask:

1. Does the program respect all the participants’ cultures and needs?

2. Does the program uplift the community, meeting them where they are and not demanding assimilation or integration?

3. Does the program care holistically for every participant?

Although we started with three Coptic women meeting in a coffee shop to write by-laws and think out programming through these three questions, Elmahaba has now blossomed into an essential community resource in Nashville, at the forefront of information, connection, translation, and support.