Founder and CEO of ROAR | Project Manager | Business Developer | Executive Manager | Philanthropist | Strategist | Business Analyst | Cross-Functional Team Leader
In the weeks after September 11, the fallen began arriving at the Air Force Port Mortuary at Dover — lives claimed by crisis the nation had no protocol to meet. Qaadirah Abdur-Rahim, a reservist specializing in mortuary affairs, was among those entrusted with their care. Nothing of that scale had ever happened on American soil. The work demanded steadiness, reverence, and order built where none existed. It was the first of many rooms she would walk into without a map — and the organizing fact of her career.
The Through Line She Can State in One Sentence
Qaadirah Abdur-Rahim is the Founder and CEO of ROAR, an AI-powered narrative intelligence platform she launched in Atlanta in March 2025. Before that, she spent more than two decades building institutions that did not exist until she helped build them: a youth organization, a city department, a corporate community function. Through it all, she has held one conviction, stated without hedging: every human being longs to be seen, heard, recognized, and valued.
East Point, Berkeley, and Seventeen Years of Building From Nothing
Her sense of purpose did not begin in uniform. It began in East Point, an under-resourced pocket of metro Atlanta that taught her what it feels like to be underestimated, and what it takes to prove a room wrong. A first-generation college student, she earned a degree in social welfare at the University of California, Berkeley, and served in the Air Force Reserve from 1997 to 2005.
In October 2003, she co-founded Future Foundation and led it as chief executive for seventeen years. It began with sixteen young people. By the time she left, it had served 30,000 students total across eight afterschool sites and five in-school health programs, with revenue grown from $230,000 to $3 million and $5 million more raised in innovation funding.
In November 2020, the City of Atlanta gave her a cabinet seat as Chief Equity Officer and Executive Director, with a mandate to build an office that had never existed. She stood up a citywide task force of eighteen department commissioners and directors, created the framework for two universal basic income pilots, and led a vaccine equity campaign that reached two million residents. The office budget grew from $1 million to $18 million.
BlackRock followed in January 2023: community strategy for an Atlanta office grown from ten people to eight hundred in five years, and a local playbook the firm intended to replicate in other markets. Volunteer participation doubled within six months.
Military. Nonprofit. City hall. Asset management. Four sectors that share almost no vocabulary, held together by someone who declined to pick a lane.
“I never believed I had to fit neatly into one box.”
She is careful about credit: in each of those firsts, another leader opened the door — a mayor, her co-founders, a market head who believed local markets needed local strategy.
“It was never one experience that shaped me. It was the compounding weight of showing up, again and again, in rooms with no map and no precedent.”
Four sectors. Four mandates without precedent. And a pattern she did not name until she had lived it.
ROAR, and the Founder Who Was Certain He Had No Story
Rather than launch broadly, Abdur-Rahim built ROAR in testing mode and withheld paid acquisition to find out whether it could earn attention on its own.
“We built a controlled pilot before we built a growth engine. That constraint forced real discipline.”
By her account, the restraint is paying off. Application traffic is up 527 percent over the last thirty days, entirely organic. Engagement is compounding week over week, and she reports a 49 percent return on cash invested inside three months, with no acquisition spend. She runs two tracks — individual users and business partnerships — so the company never depends on a single channel. She is direct about the next proof point: converting traffic into signed pilot clients and partnerships.
The clearest picture of ROAR’s purpose came out of her first ROAR for Founders workshop, at Emory’s Innovation Center. A participant pulled her aside afterward and asked what he should do if he did not have a compelling story. His name was Bertrand Byishimo. Twenty-five years old, born in Congo and raised in Rwanda, he had founded BSI Rwanda, a storytelling-driven initiative fighting bilharzia, a disease affecting 200 million people worldwide, 90 percent of them in Sub-Saharan Africa. He had reached more than 11,000 children across three Rwandan districts, won a Merck-backed pitch competition, served as a Global Health Corps Fellow, and was studying for a master’s in public health at Emory’s Rollins School. He was sincere in believing he might not have anything worth telling.
“He had one of the most compelling stories in the room — he just didn’t know it counted.”
Inside one conversation he stopped hedging and started describing his work at the weight it actually carries. That, Abdur-Rahim says, is the gap R.O.A.R. exists to close. It is not that founders lack a story. It is that no one ever taught them how to Reveal it, Own it, Amplify it, and Rise with it. She is precise about what that proves: the reason she believes the R.O.A.R process can live inclusively inside an efficient software rather than a costly, multi-week engagement. The question that stays with her is how many more Betrands are sitting in rooms right now, convinced they don’t have a story worth telling.
Still Building Without the Map
Dover had no procedure. Future Foundation had no template. Atlanta’s equity office had no precedent, and BlackRock’s local approach to community strategy had not been built anywhere in the firm before. Qaadirah Abdur-Rahim has spent close to thirty years being handed rooms without instructions, and the through line is not that she was comfortable in them. It is that she walked in anyway — each time leaving behind something that kept working after she left.
ROAR is the first one she has built so that the next person does not have to arrive empty-handed.
Qaadirah Abdur-Rahim, MBA, is the Founder and CEO of ROAR, a narrative intelligence platform based in Atlanta, Georgia. She works with purpose-driven leaders at every stage, from emerging professionals claiming their voice for the first time to executives whose impact has outpaced their public record. To connect with Qaadirah or learn more, visit her LinkedIn Profile.
