Aniqa Nawabi is a public service professional with over a decade of experience in civil society leadership and government. She currently works for New York State government, at New York State Homes and Community Renewal, where she is the Director of Special Initiatives managing $100 million+ projects in economic and housing development for the State. She began her career as an Assistant Research Scholar at New York University, working for the former Senior Economic Advisor to the President of Afghanistan (2009-2014), where she focused on international aid projects in Afghanistan. She worked on developing research papers on post-conflict states and helped develop an empirical model in understanding factors behind failing states.
After gaining her Master’s in Public Administration degree from NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service in 2013, she joined a community based non-profit organization (CBO/NGO) as their fundraising lead. As the Director of Development of Chhaya Community Development Corporation, an anti-poverty non-profit organization that works on the housing and immigrant rights of the South Asian community, she helped raise a budget of $1 million+ each year and helped expand and grow Chhaya’s reach among the individual donor and institutional funder landscape in New York City.
In 2018, she was appointed the Executive Director of another New York-based non-profit, Muslim Community Network (MCN). At MCN, she managed an entire staff transition and helped grow the organizational budget from by 200% within one year. She has also grown MCN’s programmatic footprint to include both a citywide and international presence with the launch of an international interfaith engagement for Muslim youth focused on peace-building and conflict resolution and wrote and advocated for legislation that combated hate. From program development, public relations, to organizational sustainability, Aniqa is an experienced nonprofit management professional who has worked with some of the most vulnerable populations.
Aniqa grew up in Germany and South Africa before coming to the United States and holds a Masters in Public Administration degree from New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service and a B.A. from the City University of New York-Queens College. She is a mother of three and speaks Bengali, Hindi, and Farsi.
