Sadia Tarannum: Sharing the Sacred Space of Home

“The Qur’an tells us that we cannot call ourselves believers if our neighbor is hungry or homeless.”

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Beloved for her warmth, her welcoming nature, and her unwavering community presence, Sadia Tarannum is someone we seem to see everywhere we go. Whether it’s her demanding day job, her religious leadership role, or her various volunteer commitments, Sadia shows up wherever and whenever she’s needed.

But despite her natural sociability and her steadfast commitment to community work, Sadia cherishes each moment that she spends at home.

Step inside the house that Sadia shares with her mother, and you’ll sense immediately that this space is sacred. Meticulously decorated yet comfortably lived in, this home in a cozy subdevelopment of the northwestern metro area is special. Complete with gorgeous new hardwood floors and color matched in calming green tones, each element carefully handpicked by its proud owner, it’s much more than somewhere to sleep at the end of a long day.

For Sadia, home means peace of mind. Long before this house was hers, when she and five family members were squeezed together in a small three-bedroom apartment, home meant the same thing. When she feared that her family was on the brink of losing it, she realized how critical having a place to call home is to someone’s sense of personal security.

“Not having a roof over your head, not having a place to return to is far more debilitating than missing a meal.”

“Food is the most basic need, but I think that home is right next to that,” says Sadia.

Sadia and her family moved to Minnesota from the south Indian city of Hyderabad when she was seventeen. The youngest in her family, she still had two more years of high school, while her sisters had completed their higher education before immigrating. And although she had a small network of extended family in Minnesota — what she refers to affectionately as “mini India” — she was the first to consider college.

“Navigating the system and applying for college, trying to understand financial aid, trying to get scholarships — I had to figure it all out on my own,” says Sadia. “There was nobody to give me that guidance, to show me the ropes.”

And college wasn’t the only system that Sadia was learning to navigate. As soon as she graduated from high school, she needed to work. “I took up a job at Wells Fargo doing data entry. I started liking the business world, even though I had never given finance a second thought,” she says.

At the time, Sadia was pursuing a pre-med track at the University of Minnesota. But working with data appealed to her problem-solving instincts. When her supervisor encouraged her to approach a problem with a potential solution in mind, that advice made sense. After all, it’s what she had been doing since starting college.

Most semesters, Sadia was pursuing 18 to 19 credits, on top of putting in 40 hours at her job. She would leave home in the early hours of the morning, take the 4am bus downtown to work before heading over to campus for class. Often, she didn’t get home until 11 at night — and by then, it was time to study.

Something had to give, and sleep was usually the first to go.

“For months and for years, I would sleep on the floor. I was afraid that if I got into bed, I would sleep for too long.” Too long meaning more than a couple hours.

“When I look back sometimes, I don’t know how I did it,” she admits.

But four years later, Sadia graduated with two majors and received her fifth promotion at Wells Fargo. And today, she is a successful data insights manager working in the healthcare industry with a company that manages pharmaceutical software. She’s managed teams of data scientists, engineers, and analysts across the globe; she’s integrated disparate data sources for the first time in the field. Her ability to identify and achieve solutions serves her well on the job — and off. 

When it comes to her work addressing homelessness, Sadia can’t point to a particular time or place where she got started. Even when she was living in Hyderabad, she was acutely aware of the wealth disparities.

“There will be a Maserati and then a homeless person on the same street. And I just cannot wrap my head around that disparity,” says Sadia. “Everybody says that’s how the world works — and maybe this is my naïveté — but I don’t think it should be.”

A cynic might call it naïveté, but a believer would call it faith.

“The Qur’an tells us that we cannot call ourselves believers if our neighbor is hungry or homeless.” That our spiritual sustenance is directly connected to our community’s physical and psychological security.

For Sadia, a world with security and safety for all starts with a home for each. The vision is simple, but the problem is infinitely complex. Sadia had volunteered in shelters and understood that temporary housing was simply not enough.

That’s what drew her to Beacon Interfaith Housing Collaborative. Beacon operates on a multi-pronged theory of change that includes not only housing solutions but also policy changes, addressing both short-term and long-term challenges around homelessness.

Not only did Sadia find potential solutions at Beacon, but she also found affirmations of the faith calling that she felt to address homelessness. Beacon brings together diverse faith communities to advance equitable housing. Its member congregations across Minnesota are aligned in their simple belief that all people have a right to quality affordable homes and in their shared religious call to cultivate equitable communities.

Under Sadia’s leadership, Northwest Islamic Community Center (NWICC) became the first mosque to join Beacon’s collaborative. As co-founder and current board member of the mosque, she brought Beacon’s Families Moving Forward program to the community, helping NWICC host a group of families experiencing homelessness for a week. She aims to bring awareness of this innovative model to the Muslim community and hopes that more mosques and Islamic organizations will adopt the program and join Beacon’s collaborative.

But for many Minnesotans, the issue of homelessness was brought to our attention only a year ago, when a community of Native people came together to create a safe encampment near the Franklin/Hiawatha corridor. Many of these community members were experiencing significant housing challenges due to centuries of forced assimilation and systemic genocide, and their encampment became known to some as the Wall of Forgotten Natives.

The visibility of the Hiawatha encampment prompted a vocal response from government and community, led in part by the Metropolitan Urban Indian Directors (MUID), a collation of leadership of Minneapolis Native organizations and urban Tribal offices. Partners — including many nonprofits that Sadia volunteered with — organized to provide for immediate needs while searching for permanent housing solutions.

Sadia, for her part, spent each evening after work walking through the tents and talking with the residents.

“What do you need?” she asked each individual, each family. When one mother told her that she needed a size large sweater for her son, that’s what Sadia brought back. When one family said that they wanted candles to help keep warm during the night, that’s what Sadia returned with.

“I used to write down everything and buy the long johns, the jackets, the milk, the bread,” remembers Sadia. Occasionally, she was able to help families enroll in low-income housing programs. But “it would always break my heart, that I couldn’t do anything more.”

Those months were poignant. Many moments were painful. Sadia returned to her car every night and cried before driving to her own home. Most nights, she got even less sleep than she did during her college days.

“You just couldn’t go back to your warm bed and sleep,” she says, her voice breaking.

Safe and warm in her home today, those nights still weigh heavy on Sadia’s heart. As she works with other families experiencing homelessness, she holds close the names of her friends from the encampment. And fueled by the stories of those who secured stable housing, she dreams of the day that every person feels the same sense of security and belonging that she does when she walks into her house.

Propelled by her profound empathy and carried along by her constant sacrifices, Sadia is slowly pushing her community toward the realization of that dream. Putting herself in the path of pain and sorrow, she’s modeling the behavior that can change our society for the better.

Sadia, thank you for your steadfast leadership and your deep sense of integrity. Thank you for being our Shero.