Long before it became his job, the fight for human rights was Tawanda Mutasah’s conviction — something he inherited from his mother, who taught him that, “Every person matters. Take them all seriously.”
Drawing on language from Genesis 1:27 — “God created mankind in his own image” — her plain-spoken wisdom guided Mutasah on a journey that, in February 2026, brought him to American Jewish World Service (AJWS) as its new president and CEO.
“It was a simple formulation,” he said, “but it was a classic rendering of the ideas and values that we think about when we talk about b’tzelem Elohim. It made it clear to me that human rights matter, that voice matters, that human dignity matters.”
For AJWS, which this year celebrated four decades defending marginalized voices, Mutasah’s arrival is fortuitous. His expertise, gained in global leadership roles at peer organizations like Amnesty International and the Open Society Foundations, is rooted in a boyhood spent on the margins.
Convictions from Childhood
Mutasah grew up in the provincial capital of Masvingo in southeastern Zimbabwe. At the time, Masvingo was a segregated ghetto, where a river ran between the haves and the have-nots — a reality that did not escape his notice. On one side, streets were safer, roads were paved, and schools were well-resourced; on the other, effluent flowed in the streets, schools were overcrowded, and children dressed in rags.
“From the outset, it was clear to me that inequality was fundamentally structural,” he said. “That compelled me to be concerned about everything I saw, to wonder about it, to ask questions about it.”
Even at age 9, Mutasah diagnosed several “self-inflicted wounds” within his community that, decades later, reflect human rights hurdles AJWS and its grantees combat. Parents forced female classmates into child marriages; neighborhood men beat their wives brutally; gender-based violence was pervasive.
While he admits that structural inequalities lie at the root of these problems, solving them is not our only task.
“We must look at the structural issues but at the same time, each of us must look inward and ask, ‘what can I contribute?'” Mutasah said. “I’m firmly convinced that structural realities do not absolve me from taking responsibility for what I can do better.”
Those lessons fueled a lifelong desire to tackle injustice. He studied law at the University of Zimbabwe, immersing himself in the student union and eventually stepping into a leadership role. But that activism came at a cost. He was expelled for his involvement, tortured, and forced to flee to South Africa to continue his studies, experiences that hardened his resolve.
“I still carry the fire in my belly that I had then,” he said, “that conviction that struggles for human rights are necessary, that they are part of our urgency and commitment as human beings.”
This conviction has guided Mutasah’s decades of work across the human rights, development, and humanitarian sectors where he has led programs in civil and political rights, economic and social rights, climate and environmental justice, gender and racial justice, and humanitarian law — areas familiar to the AJWS community.
When Mutasah first encountered AJWS, he saw alignment beyond its programmatic mix: in the people, the values, and the model. Joining the team, he said, seemed beshert — “destiny” in Yiddish— as AJWS’s values resonate deeply with his own.
Mutasah noted that AJWS’s commitment to tikkun olam — repairing the world — complements his own understanding that humanity is bound together. That AJWS’s mission is informed by Jewish experience and moral courage, he said, embodies what Rabbi Heschel called “praying with my feet.”
“The idea we can ‘pray with our feet’ as an organization founded in Jewish values and commitments is part of the strength of AJWS,” he said.
“Now is the Time”
With human rights under assault globally, moral courage is needed more than ever. From rising authoritarianism to escalating violence against LGBTQI+ communities, from rollbacks on reproductive rights to oppression of women and girls, Mutasah called out an alarming degeneration of the post-World War II order that speaks directly to the way AJWS operates.
“In a context like that,” he said, “AJWS’s work is cut out for it. We are in a moment where the historical infrastructure of norms and values that we once depended on is being torn asunder.”
AJWS knows this shift up close. In 2025, following the federal government’s shutdown of USAID, one in five grantee partners lost 30 percent or more of their funding — some 99 partners. Thirty-one of those lost more than 50 percent of their funding. In addition, public policies that helped grantees thrive are being rewritten by the United States as well as by the countries where AJWS works, thwarting the grassroots organizing that grantees do so well. Now is the time, Mutasah argued, for civil society to unite and draw on the wellspring of ideas, principles, and moral leadership as a unified front.
“I know that solidarity matters because I have myself been on the receiving end of state brutality when I was a student leader in Zimbabwe,” Mutasah said. “I’ve known what it means to struggle for human rights and to work to your convictions about human worth and dignity and face the brutality of those that hold power — and sometimes turn looking for solidarity, looking for support and not finding it.”
In this moment, AJWS must renew the vision of human rights, restore momentum, and win new allies among those who feel discouraged and are ready to make change. He points to long-term support of grantees, in-country staff working closely with local activists, and dogged advocacy in D.C. as key to building the infrastructure that will withstand, and eventually overcome, the backlash against human rights.
And, as always, he is leaning on his mother’s wisdom to meet the challenges ahead.
“She was my first inspiration for understanding that hope is actually the currency that one uses to come out of difficult situations and circumstances,” Mutasah said. “It is not bitterness. It is not resentment. It is not anything else but hope. Hope itself can be a radical proposition.”