Generosity Across Borders: Small Acts, Big Impact With Rukhsana Rahman

In this episode of You Can’t Take it With You, host Jim Dunlop sits down with Rukhsana Rahman, Advisor to Muslim Students at Gettysburg College, to discuss the powerful impact of generosity. They explore the origins of Rukhsana’s philanthropic journey, the global initiatives she has spearheaded, and the profound influence of her faith on her approach to giving.

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Rukhsana Rahman is the Advisor to Muslim Students at Gettysburg College, where she supports, mentors, and coaches students in need. A retired radiologist from Gettysburg Hospital, Rukhsana has been deeply involved in community service and international development since 2010, serving on several local and international boards, including the Adams County Library and the Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development. Originally from London, with roots in Pakistan and Zambia, she has dedicated her efforts to various causes, including education and interfaith initiatives.

Episode Summary:

How can small acts of kindness ripple out to significantly impact communities both near and far? Whether helping a neighbor or supporting a cause halfway around the world, generosity often lies in our seemingly simple daily actions. What drives these actions, and how can we all embrace this mindset?

According to Rukhsana Rahman, a dedicated philanthropist, small acts of generosity stem from a deep-seated belief in giving back. She highlights that these actions don’t require grand gestures but a willingness to help where and when you can, like putting quarters in an expired parking meter or sending much-needed supplies to a school in another country. Rukhsana believes that when we engage in these everyday acts of kindness, we not only uplift those immediately affected but also contribute to a culture of generosity that transcends borders and transforms lives.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Jim Dunlop on LinkedIn
• Advent Partners
• Rukhsana Rahman: LinkedIn | Email

Special Mentions

• Angela Kay Zimmann on LinkedIn
• Martin Otto-Zimmann on LinkedIn
• Adams County Library
• Adams County Farmers Market
• Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development
• YWCA Gettysburg & Adams County
• Gettysburg College
• Delone Catholic High School

Quotable Moments

• “Sometimes people ask me where I’m from, and I jokingly say, ‘How much time do you have?’”
• “I was recently doing some fundraising for a student in need, and one of my friends wrote a check for $1,000, and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I need to be just like her.’”
• “Simple things like being proud of their uniform and being clean can change lives in ways we don’t fully account for, but that makes all the difference.”
• “Don’t sit back and say, ‘Well, things are hopeless’ or ‘We’re done; The world is ending.’ Keep doing the good that you are doing.”
• “All you have shall someday be given. Therefore, give now so the season of giving may be yours and not your inheritors.”

Action Steps

1. Adopt or support educational institutions in need, locally or internationally: Doing so impacts the current generation and sets the stage for enduring community advancement and global connections.
2. Participate in board work or similar volunteer roles for non-profits: These roles can broaden your knowledge of philanthropic work and provide opportunities to make significant contributions.
3. Pay attention to small acts of kindness; they can make a big difference: Even a small deed like paying for an expired meter can cultivate an atmosphere of generosity and encourage others to do the same.
4. Let your faith or personal beliefs guide your actions in giving: Grounding charitable efforts in personal convictions can give them a more profound sense of purpose and sustainability.
5. Be willing to give without expecting immediate or quantifiable returns: True generosity is about making a difference without getting caught up in the figures, knowing that your contribution has its own value.

Sponsor for this episode:

This episode is brought to you by Advent Partners — a financial planning partner dedicated to helping you make informed decisions that simplify your financial journey. 

Our seasoned team is committed to guiding you toward your financial goals. We offer tailored solutions based on your specific needs, from standalone financial planning to integrated financial management.

Whether you are planning for the future, investing for growth, or navigating financial hurdles, Advent Partners is here to provide insights, recommendations, and a clear financial roadmap.

To learn more about Advent Partners and how we can guide your financial success, visit AdventPartnersFP.com.

Episode Transcript:

Intro 0:00

Welcome to the You Can’t Take it With You show where we feature stories around generosity designed to inspire and encourage others to do meaningful things in their communities. Now here’s your host, Jim Dunlop,

Jim Dunlop 0:16

Hi, Jim Dunlop, here, a wealth advisor and host of this show where I sit down with people who get it when it comes to generosity. I’m excited to have guests who can give us stories on generosity to not only inspire our listeners, but to give practical ideas on ways we can give. Today’s guest is Rukhsana Rahman. Before we get to Rukhsana, I want to share that this episode is brought to you by Advent Partners, Ready for Good. Advent is a financial planning team dedicated to helping you make informed decisions that simplify your financial journey. Advent’s seasoned team of professionals is committed to guiding you toward your financial goals. We offer tailored solutions based on your specific needs, from standalone financial planning to integrated financial management. We help our clients get ready for good, whether you’re planning for the future, investing for growth or navigating financial hurdles. Advent Partners is here to provide insights, recommendations, and a clear financial roadmap. To learn more about Advent Partners and how we can guide your financial success, visit readyforgood.com. Before introducing today’s guest, I want to give a big thank you to our previous guest, Angela Zimmann and her husband, Martin. They strongly suggested that I talk to Rukhsana today. Be sure to listen to Angela’s episode at canttakeitwithyou.com. It’s episode five. So now let me introduce Rukhsana Rahman. Rukhsana is a retired radiologist from Gettysburg Hospital. She and her husband moved to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in 1986 they have three adopted adult children and a cat. Rukhsana was born in London, England to parents of Indian descent, and grew up in Pakistan and Zambia. Since 2010, Rukhsana has served on numerous local and international boards. Currently, she serves on the Adams County Library and Adams County Farmers Market boards, as well as Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development from Jerusalem in Israel and Palestine, she has taken active roles in fundraising and mission related activities for these organizations, including an organization near and dear to my family, the YWCA of Gettysburg, where she served three terms on the board in 2009 she and her husband adopted a primary school in Islamabad, Pakistan for five years. Also that year, she started collecting lightly used medical, nursing, and pharmacy textbooks and shipping them to her alma mater in Zambia. Rukhsana currently serves as an advisor to Muslim students at Gettysburg College. She enjoys supporting, mentoring, and coaching students in need, locally, and internationally. Rukhsana, welcome to the show.

Rukhsana Rahman 2:47

Thank you for having me.

Jim Dunlop 2:50

I’m really excited to talk to you today, and I was hoping you could start off by giving our listeners a little autobiography about yourself and how you started off in London, have had several stops along the way, and ultimately ended up here in my hometown and your hometown of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Rukhsana Rahman 3:08

Yes, so when we moved to Gettysburg in 1986, we didn’t think we would be here this long, because both Arthur and I had moved a lot as kids. But here we are, all these decades later. Sometimes people ask me what my background is, or where I’m from, and I jokingly say, How much time do you have? But in brief, I was born in England. When I was three years old, we moved back to Pakistan. My father was working for the Pakistani embassy, and his six-year term in London was over. We lived in Pakistan from 1968 to no, sorry, 1958 to 68 which was an interesting time in Karachi, Pakistan. I was homeschooled up to fifth grade, and then went to four different high schools, four different schools, between fifth grade and ninth grade. So we moved a lot. Even in Karachi when I was 13, my dad got a really good job opportunity with the government of Zambia. So we moved to Lusaka, Zambia, where I finished high school, and then went on to college in medical school. During medical school, I kind of fell in love with radiology and decided I wanted to pursue further residency training in radiology. So I applied and got into an internship in New Jersey, moved here, did my internship, met my husband, got married, finished my residency, and moved to Gettysburg because we wanted to be in a town of about this size, plus a town that had significance, and it would be good, you know, to raise a family. And so that’s in a nutshell, where I’m from. And when somebody asks me, what’s of all the places where I’ve lived, which have I loved the most? I love every place that I’ve lived.

Jim Dunlop 5:18

And why did you choose medicine?

Rukhsana Rahman 5:22

So I didn’t really choose medicine. My father chose it for me. He was very keen on having his daughter become a medical doctor. Because he couldn’t become a medical doctor. His father had passed away when he was six years old. This was in rural India. His mother was left as a single mom for eight children, and he was number six of the eight kids, and he so he couldn’t, he couldn’t go to medical school, so he encouraged me to do that, but, and I kind of resisted it all along. I said I didn’t want to do it, but medicine and radiology just gave me such a good life, such a good career, so much respect, so much good feedback and very rewarding.

Jim Dunlop 6:17

Neat. And how long of your career was your father able to see if any?

Rukhsana Rahman 6:24

My father lived a really good long life. He was 95 and he passed away in 2017.

Jim Dunlop 6:30

He must have been so pleased and proud.

Rukhsana Rahman 6:33

Yeah, he was, I think he was a little he had some reservations when I chose radiology as a non-clinical field. I think he’s kind of saw me as a clinician, but I just fell in love with that. I couldn’t see myself being anything other than a radiologist at that point.

Jim Dunlop 6:51

So Rukhsana, you’ve been very engaged in this community, and then both locally and internationally, with lots of organizations, giving tremendously of yourself and your time and your resources. What drives your personal generosity? In other words, how did you get started? What’s your generosity origin story?

Rukhsana Rahman 7:18

I think the origin story is that my father, being that he was one of eight children, and he, he was the one who got educated, and he always gave back to his roots. He never forgot his roots, so that I just grew up with that every day. It was a thing, okay, so and so needs some money. So and So needs schooling and that kind of support. But I was fortunate that my husband sort of had the similar background, so we both knew that we wanted to give back. His family has a similar background to mine, and his motivation was that he got a lot of support when he came to this country as a young, young fellow. So I’ve seen the giving part and the receiving part and how it changes lives. And as you know, that’s the origin of the story. But as you get older, the reasons change, reasons why I give is more now, a little a little bit more faith based, because I see the importance in in my faith journey, and basically, you know, I’ve come across people I was recently doing some fundraising for a student in need, and one of my friends just wrote a check for $1,000 and I thought, oh my gosh, there are people out there. I need to be just like her. I need to be like Ellen. So yeah.

Jim Dunlop 8:52

So you have a number of projects that really intrigued me as we were getting prepped for this episode. And tell me about the school in Islamabad that you and your husband were sponsoring and helping, and what led to that, and what were some of the outcomes of that?

Rukhsana Rahman 9:09

So what led to that is, at that point, we sort of were understanding that we didn’t need to have college tuition for our children. All three of our kids have learning disabilities. They’re on the spectrum on different issues. And so we knew, Okay, we don’t need to save 50, 60, 70, $80,000 a year for college tuition. So I started talking to my family in Islamabad and said, I want to do something, and one of my cousins is in the education sector, a nonprofit sector in Islamabad. She suggested that we adopt the school. The Pakistani government at that point had a program called adopt a school. So they give you sort of. Uh, the background of different schools, and you pick which one you think you can influence the most or which is the most needful at that point. So this school in inner city Islamabad, was a school of about 430 students. It went from grade one to five. It was 60% Muslim and 40% Christian. And the thing that was most impactful to us about the school is that the girls from the school were generally once they ended fifth grade, were then taken out of school so they could help their mothers with housework or earn money cleaning houses or whatever, and we all know, if the girls are educated even up to high school, it just changes the next generation. So what adopting the school involved was adding a kindergarten. They didn’t have a kindergarten. We added that. We added one section, and ended up being two sections within a year, because all the people found out that the school was, you know, being supported by an international donor, and so, and the person we hired in Islamabad had Montessori background, so she was able to bring that into the mix. And it was, you know, the little things that don’t really, I mean, if you say, Well, did the grades go up? Yes, they did. But what really happened was the kids learned simple things, like being proud of their uniform, being clean. They would clean their shoes if they had to walk through muddy water, they would bring a rag from home and, you know, clean each other’s shoes. It was just feeling good about where they’re going, who they are, instead of just having no hope in their future. And then in 2004 I believe, five years later, this government decided to close the program so the additional teachers who we had hired, and they went on to do other things because the experience they had had here, but we’re no longer involved in that.

Jim Dunlop 12:14

Interesting. And also, you’ve embarked on a, not maybe adopting it, but collecting supplies and educational resources for your alma mater in Zambia. Tell me a little bit about that project.

Rukhsana Rahman 12:31

So one of the things that we say in our faith is that when God wants you to do good things. You will come up with the things, they will just fall in your lap, pretty much. So this was, I don’t know if you knew Mary Furlong, but almost everybody in this area knows Mary Furlong. She has passed away. She was a retired Delone Catholic School high school teacher. She had been to Zambia, and I met her just randomly at an event. We realized we were both, you know, had Zambia in our heart. And I was telling her about, I want to do something, you know, for my medical school. I want to do something for the university. And she said, you know, they haven’t…she had been back to Zambia more recently than I had, and she said you could just, you could send them books. They haven’t bought new books in a while. So we put the word out among friends, kids who were in medical school at that point, people who were working in large university hospitals, teaching hospitals, and the first, the first batch, was about 250 books that was collected through a teacher at Delone because a bunch of her students had parents in the healthcare field. So, yeah, we go through the books, we’d make sure that they’re not badly marked up and they’re relevant, and nothing to do with healthcare in the US and, you know, basically the basic anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, that kind of stuff. And that has been ongoing. We haven’t done it as much anymore, because I think when we started, it was just the perfect timing. Medical schools were sort of getting rid of books that were not being used anymore because the things were online. And, yeah, it’s we’ve probably sent, I stopped keeping track of it, but we probably sent about 1000 books so far, it’s been it’s been great because the people who are, who were collecting the books from are thanking us, thank you for taking these books so they don’t go on the, you know, on the landfill and the place where we are sending them, are very thankful to have them.

Jim Dunlop 14:59

So. I, this is really neat to hear this. Are there any other projects or stories that you can think of from the different organizations you’ve been involved with that our listeners might like to hear or would be inspiring to them, even if it’s just a very practical thing.

Rukhsana Rahman 15:20

So the thing that just comes to mind, that’s a very practical and it’s almost something we don’t think about. Just recently, I was going into the bakery in town, and the car in front of me, the meter was expired, so I put two quarters in the meter, and it just so happened when I came out that it was a it was a young man who had gone into the barbershop, and he came out, and he was looking frantically at the meter, and saw that the meter still had time in it. So I went up to him, and I said, your meter was expired, and I put two quarters in it. And he looked at me, thinking, I want my quarters back or something. And I said, I’m just telling you that. So if you come across a situation like this, you will also just put money in the meter. And there’s just so much we can do without really even having to think about it, just on a daily basis. Just if you have a cart full of groceries and the person behind you only has two items, let them go in front of you, just stuff like that that we can all do.

Jim Dunlop 16:25

Yeah, and people who aren’t familiar with the parking situation in Gettysburg, that’s a very generous act.

Rukhsana Rahman 16:33

Yes, we, sometimes, I, sometimes I feel like I’m supporting the Gettysburg borough with my parking tickets. Yeah, but I’m good now. I’ve figured out all the streets with free parking.

Jim Dunlop 16:48

Yes, and I don’t want to say them out loud on the show, because then we’ll lose those spots.

Rukhsana Rahman 16:52

No, that’s right.

Jim Dunlop 16:57

Are there other people who have influenced your generosity? Obviously, your father played a pretty significant role. Who are some other folks that you’ve seen, or who come to mind that have been very influential for your generosity?

Rukhsana Rahman 17:13

When I started working, volunteering at boards in 2010 I had just been working at that till that point, just working and taking care of my family, and then I saw all these people donating their time and resources to board work, and it was just very inspiring for me. I didn’t know the nonprofit world at all, so I felt like I needed to learn because everybody else seemed to know more than I did. I didn’t know what succession plan was. I didn’t even know the lingo. And it was just, it was just, you know, a lot of these nonprofit organizations wouldn’t work if people were not serving on the boards. And I think that’s one of the beauties of the USA. One of the beauties of America is all the volunteer work that gets done. You don’t see that. I didn’t grow up seeing that. I didn’t grow up seeing a lot of volunteering. It’s happening more and more in other places also, but to me in America, that’s like the beauty of how things get done.

Jim Dunlop 18:27

That’s, uh, well, that’s, it’s, it’s always refreshing to hear that perspective. I know, again, that your dad was an early influence, but I know too that as you’ve gotten older, your faith has played a bigger and bigger role in your generosity. Would you mind talking a little bit about that?

Rukhsana Rahman 18:44

Sure, so, as you get older, and especially after my parents passed away in 2017 and then 2019 your mortality just becomes more of a reality. You know, you don’t think about it, until, for me, at least, I didn’t really think about it. And in Islam charity has a huge, huge role. There is something called, it’s an Arabic word which translates into ongoing, infinite charity and education is that once you educate a person, you have made a difference in not only their life, but all the other lives that they touch, the future generations and in, in Our belief, you get the rewards of all the good that you’ve done that’s going on in the world. You plant a tree, and it’s that you get rewarded for it. And there’s a Hadith, or a saying of Prophet Muhammad, that if on the Day of Judgment, on once the bugle has been sounded if you have a tree in your hand, you’re ready to plant, go ahead and plant it, which to me, it’s like, oh my gosh. That means don’t sit back and say, well, things are hopeless, or we’re done. The world is ending. Keep doing the good that you are doing. And that, to me, is a reminder every day I keep that in the back of my mind as to don’t sit back and think you’re done. You’re not done.

Jim Dunlop 20:27

I really like that image. It’s not something that I had ever heard, but it’s a very beautiful and symbolic thought of if you’re holding that, the idea of holding that tree in your hand to keep planting. So I really appreciate you taking some time with us today to share and talk a little bit about yourself and some of the work that you’ve done. I do have a few final wrap-up questions, but before I do that, were there any other stories or any other ideas that you wanted to share with our listeners today that we haven’t touched on yet.

Rukhsana Rahman 21:10

I can’t think of anything other than if your heart tells you that this is something that you need to do, do it. Don’t question it. Don’t look for results like the school in Pakistan, you know, people want to see transcripts of the students or, you know, statistics, you don’t really need…I’m not saying throw away your money when you don’t see it doing any good, but don’t necessarily get caught up in the numbers and figures and stuff like that.

Jim Dunlop 21:40

Thank you. I think that’s really helpful. And before, before we do get to our final question, I just wanted to offer to any of our listeners, if you’d like to be connected with Rukhsana, she’s offered to share her email through me, so just send an email to the show, and we’d be happy to individually connect any listeners with Rukhsana. So Rukhsana, I have one final question here, and it’s if you could share some wisdom or advice on a billboard where it would reach many, many people, what would your message be?

Rukhsana Rahman 22:13

So I have my signature on my Yahoo email, and I find that to be quite profound. It’s by Khalil Gibran, and it says, all you have shall someday be given. Therefore give now, so the season of giving may be yours and not your inheritors. I would love to see that on a billboard. You can make that happen. That would be awesome.

Jim Dunlop 22:40

Well, I would love to and boy, boy, oh, boy, does that not fit with the theme of this show, the idea of you can’t take it with you, and so don’t wait to be generous.

Rukhsana Rahman 22:53

Thank you very much.

Jim Dunlop 22:54

It has been wonderful having you here today, and we’ll look forward to talking to you again soon. Thanks.

Rukhsana Rahman 23:01

Thank you very much. Keep doing what you’re doing.

Jim Dunlop 23:04

Thank you. I will.

Outro 23:08

Thanks for joining us to hear stories of generosity that remind us that you can’t take it with you. Visit our site at canttakeitwithyou.com. For more details on today’s episode and to subscribe to future shows.

Disclosure 23:26

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