Carolyne Zinko March 26, 2015 Updated: March 26, 2015 5:58 p.m.
Silicon Valley philanthropist Bita Daryabari, known in the society pages for her stylish good looks, has a secret second life — and it doesn’t involve designer duds or diamonds.
Twice a week, the 46-year-old mother of three puts on jeans and a T-shirt and heads from her Atherton home to a nondescript office building in San Jose, where she answers phones, flips through reports and, sometimes, plunges toilets.
Keeping things flowing smoothly is her mission at her Daryabari Iranian Community Center. When the ribbon is cut April 16, it will be the first in the nation to provide legal and social services in Farsi to Iranian immigrants and refugees from other nations where the language is spoken.
The center, with a staff of 19 led by Reza Odabaee, a 20-year veteran of Catholic Charities, expands upon the Pars Equality Center in San Jose, a legal service that Daryabari founded five years ago to help Iranians battle discrimination after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. After the number of clients decreased there, Daryabari toured other local nonprofits and learned that Iranian newcomers were getting the social services they needed elsewhere. In 2012, she added job placement, income tax help, computer classes, English lessons, parenting courses, yoga for seniors and more, all conducted in Farsi.
To keep pace with demand, operations recently moved to a larger, 13,000-square-foot building at 1635 the Alameda, cheek to jowl with the Rose Garden district. The U.S. census does not track the number of Iranians in the United States, but a U.S. Office of Homeland Security report put the number of Iranian refugees entering the U.S. from 2003 to 2012 at 32,371, most living in Texas and California. The Bay Area community is centered in the South Bay.
She agrees — theoretically — that she could spend her time sitting around eating bonbons and traveling the world but rejects the idea.
Daryabari wants her life to have purpose, and it does.
In 2006, she created the Unique Zan Foundation to improve education, health and job opportunities for women in the Middle East. Through philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, she met human rights activist Sakeena Yacoobi, founder of the Afghan Institute of Learning, and partnered in 2007 to build a girls’ school in Kabul. In 2008, she endowed a $2.5 million Persian studies chair at Stanford University. Pars followed in 2010, and a Los Angeles branch followed after that. All told, Pars serves nearly 500 clients a year. The Daryabari center will be open to newcomers of all nationalities.
Daryabari will be honored by the World Affairs Council in San Francisco on May 26 for her work. But awards are not what motivate her.
Daryabari knows assimilating can be hard. As a teen in 1985, her father, a dentist, and mother, a homemaker, sent her from Iran to live with her uncle in Missouri. She’d resisted laws requiring women to wear a hijab, a veil that covers all but the face, and resistors faced jail or even death. In the Midwest, her classmates called her a terrorist. Five years earlier, in the Iranian hostage crisis, 66 Americans were held captive for 444 days at the American Embassy in Tehran by militants.
That feedback is why Daryabari spends time on the ground, working for the results clients need.
Humble, too. Liquid Plumr, anyone?