Mustafa Dustin Craun
Founder & executive director 0f the center for global muslim life
Mustafa Dustin Craun is a creative strategist, filmmaker, writer, digital media producer, ethnic studies scholar, and community organizer. His work in digital media has been featured in over 200 global publications, and his writings on race, philosophy, and Islamic studies have been published in academic journals and popular publications.
He has a bachelor's in Ethnic Studies from the University of Colorado-Boulder and a Masters in Ethnic Studies from the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. He studied Latin American philosophy and the Decoloniality school of thought in the graduate school of Ethnic Studies at the University of California-Berkeley, and traditional Islamic Studies at Zaytuna College.
Cultural Change Strategist
Mustafa Dustin Craun has worked for eighteen years as a public relations and digital media strategist, and over the last six years as a filmmaker. Focused on faith based and social impact storytelling he has built organizations and brands like MPower Change, Ummah Wide, and most recently the Center for Global Muslim Life and the Border Mosque.
He is the founder of Beyond Borders Studios a digital production studio focused on digital strategy, and film production. With Beyond Borders Studios he has worked with clients startups, nonprofits, universities, and corporations of many different sizes including the University of California at Berkeley, The Othering and Belonging Institute, Port of Mokha Coffee, the Walt Disney Studios, The California Endowment, 500 Startups, Faith in Action National Network, MoveON, The University of Colorado at Boulder, and CAIR California.
As an executive producer, producer, and director he has produced 10 short films to date including - A Prayer Beyond Borders, Hacking for Peace, The All Seeing Eyes of San Diego Surveillance, We Are California - Vote For Our Future, Transforming California from Red to Blue - How Community Organizing Changed the Political Landscape, and From Palestine to Mexico - Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib Visits the Border Mosque. He is currently working on his first feature-length documentary, A Prayer Beyond Borders.
Raised in Denver, Colorado, Dustin has spent his adult life building with communities around the world, having lived in Mexico, Ghana, Morocco, California, the Middle East and Malaysia. Dustin brings a uniquely transnational lens to the interconnected world we inhabit.
Social Movement Strategist
Over the last eighteen years I’ve worked with dozens of organizations from non-profits to startups on communication, and digital content strategies. I’ve worked intentionally in the Muslim community in the Untied States and around the world over these years. Working with a broad diversity of organizations as a co-founder of MPower Change, I understand deeply the need for experienced communications strategists like myself playing a broader movement role.
As a digital strategist who worked with the Othering & Belonging Institute at UC-Berkeley to build their strategic narrative website, BluePrint for Belonging, I was able to work within a broader movement strategy space at a very high level. From web design, to film production, and training design, these types of projects have always been the best fit for me as a content and communications strategist.
Over the last nine years I have worked in management positions as a communications director within the Faith in Action network, as a founder of my own production studio Beyond Borders Studios, and as a co-founder of MPower Change. As a consultant managing the team at the Othering & Belonging Institute is one of my proudest accomplishments within the field. When we started on that project they gave me a file of PDF’s and asked me to lead them in producing films, a website, and trainings around strategic narrative. Working not only with the team at the Othering & Belonging Institute but also with 50 partner organizations across the state this was a massive project. In creating project management work flows using Slack, Trello, and Google docs I was able to work with the team through the process while also leading on the hiring of designers and film makers on the project.
Over the years I have worked on very difficult issues that never garner enough press coverage. From working across Muslim organizations, to working with formerly incarcerated communities, the American Indian Movement of Colorado, to undocumented youth, and separated families at the US / Mexico border. I’ve also worked on successful anti- surveillance campaigns in Oakland and San Diego that have proven to be some of the most difficult communications work I’ve ever done in explaining complex issues like surveillance in soundbites.
Throughout this work I’ve always worn my organizing hat with my media production lens to build relationships and to learn journalists views on issues. A great recent example of this was with the work I’ve been organizing around with as I built the Border Mosque to work with the Border Church at the US / Mexico border. We intentionally did not reach out to media as this work began, instead deciding to capture the true essence of this Christian / Muslim relationship in my film, “A Prayer Beyond Borders.”
When we launched the film with MoveON we reached out to media with the help of ReThink Media and offered the film for distribution to news outlets. Within this process Imam Omar Suleiman introduced me to a group of journalists from NowThis. As we began building a relationship with the NowThis producers I was able to related to them as a filmmaker with the ideas I had to expand our film work at the Border Mosque further.
One of the most important stories for me to tell was about the Muslim Ban communities of Yemeni and Somali men we had began to meet there. As we talked more NowThis pitched the story to their executive producers and they were approved to make the film. They came to Tijuana for one of our Border Mosque/ Border Church gatherings in December where we brought Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib to the Border. With Congresswoman Tlaib’s powerful words comparing the wall at the US / Mexico border to the Wall in Palestine, Melissa was able to produce a beautiful piece for NowThis.
They then came back to shoot a feature doc for NowThis with the stories of the Muslim Ban communities in Tijuana. Unfortunately with COVID the documentary has been put on hold like so much else. This is an example of not only working with a journalist but to get a major news organization to tell our movements stories and to invest resources that we as a movement didn’t have into important stories we could not tell ourselves.
At a movement level Muslim, and broader AMEMSA (Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian) organizations are deeply fragmented from a communications strategy perspective. Our organizations and our movements have to understand the need for narrative infrastructure within our movements. Many organizations in these movements are stuck in a 1990s theory of change that made sense when our communities were smaller, less well connected and had less power. Today we can use broad communications strategies tied to digital organizing as we have built at MPower Change. These models need to be more broadly scaled within the movement.
I’ve outlined my thinking on this question in several articles online about digital publishing and branding. Generally speaking the work needs to be done at a very high level today from design to production, with clear social justice language. Our movements must invest in narrative infrastructure and have budgets and creative producers to bring attention to our movements through building narrative power. One of my favorite mottos is from Pixar, “Our brand is quality.” I also think some of the training from the Center for Story Based Strategy is very useful for leaders who may not understand the importance of comms work in their framing around the “Battle of the story.” I’ve created many different trainings for organizations based on this model.