Building stronger communities, together.

Parisa Pirooz founded Creshendo on a belief that shapes everything the organization does: the people closest to a challenge are best equipped to design the response to it.

A lawyer by training and nonprofit leader by practice, she has spent years working alongside families navigating displacement and rebuilding their lives in systems not designed with them in mind. That proximity is the work.

Parisa has worked with displaced communities in the United States, Türkiye, and Jordan, including on the federal response to the Afghanistan evacuation, where she helped launch programming across multiple U.S. safe havens. She later spent four years consulting within one of the nation’s largest refugee resettlement networks before founding Creshendo to test a different model, one where community members are co-designers, facilitators, and leaders rather than recipients of services.

Under her leadership, Creshendo has grown to more than 50 volunteers across 20+ countries, organized into seven multidisciplinary teams. The organization’s ambition is to develop practical methods, leadership pathways, and evidence that other organizations can adopt to strengthen migrant-led approaches across the sector.

Parisa believes that systems designed without the people they serve will always fall short, no matter how well-resourced they are.