Youth on Board

As someone who is Palestinian and Hong Kong Chinese, I come from communities that have been fighting for sovereignty, so it is part of my family history and an innate interest. I grew up knowing that my Palestinian grandparents and their siblings had seen people being murdered, all around them. When Zionist forces came into Haifa in 1948, my family – and 700,000 other Palestinians – fled. My family went to Egypt for what they thought would be a little while. They left clothing on the line, food in the fridge and plates on the table, like they were intending to come back. This is why the key is such a big symbol for Palestinians: We are always attached to the idea of return.  

My siblings and I were born and raised in the Greater Toronto Area – Scarborough and Markham – but my extended family is scattered all over the world. On holidays, we have the privilege of getting together. All these cross-international and cross-generational bonds feed my understanding of my family’s and community’s history and give me the drive to speak out against any kind of injustice, whenever it arises.  

I actually went to school for health science, with the intent of going to medical school. It was the kind of natural thought process you go through as a child of immigrants. You’re somebody who does well in school. You want to do a job that helps people and contributes to the community. So, you think: Hey, I’ll just be a doctor. But while at school, I had the opportunity to do several internships that exposed me to different levels of government and different sectors. I started to think more from a systems lens. Medicine is a noble profession, but a lot of the time, you’re treating people once they’re already sick instead of supporting a system that changes the conditions that cause people to face all these adverse social determinants of health. 

I wound up entering the University of Waterloo’s entrepreneurship ecosystem and eventually landed a co-op with the Ontario government, working on social finance and social procurement. It was my first exposure to the field and made me realize that the world works in ways that are based on economic and monetary interests. I began exploring if the movement of capital could be based on care for community and planet instead of just profit, expansion and greed. If you can change the way money flows, you can change someone’s economic condition. After graduation, I joined the McConnell Foundation as a social innovation fellow, and they helped me upskill into finance, which led to a role with SVX where I’ve been working for nearly four years. 

The desire to stay true to my values and create impact is what draws me to everything – Plan Canada included! Board work interested me. I’d worked at enough foundations and non-profits to understand the extent to which boards influence the affairs of the organization and the communities they serve. I wanted to see the decision-making process up close, to see how change happens at a systems level.

I saw Plan doing things in an interesting and different way. Even though decolonization and localization [putting decision making into the hands of people directly impacted by aid funds and development programs] is a relatively new strategic focus at Plan, I saw it pushed forward and articulated, especially on our board trip to Ghana. Meeting Dr. Solomon TesfaMariam, then director of Plan International Ghana and the team was the best part of that experience. The effort and planning that his team puts into community building – the way they access and unite all these different communities that are vast distances apart – is incredible. There’s a lot to learn from Plan Ghana. Decolonization and localization is obviously difficult, but Plan has the building blocks and ingredients to implement it properly. 

Yes! Under Solomon’s leadership, many youth from Plan Ghana’s programming get offered positions that give them a seat at the table. For example, some of the folks I met were sponsored children who stayed involved in the Plan network, using their lived experience to advocate for their communities in rooms where there are massive flows of money and decisions being made. Overall, there’s a lot to be said for how Plan International connects youth across different country offices. The interconnection and power of youth is the organization’s driving force. 

Youth and vocal folk in general are the ones who check organizations so that we are constantly thinking of impact and delivering on the work that needs to be done. There is a fluidity to social justice work and social impact work. Constant evolution is something youth fundamentally understand. Youth, particularly those with lived experience or from equity-deserving communities, act as the translators between grassroots needs and organizational action. It is often the role of youth to question existing organizational and social norms, even if uncomfortable. Every massive movement has seen students at its forefront, and young people are finding super-creative, original ways to support the causes they care about.

Beyond connecting young people and keeping them up to date, social media provides the tools to create a network that fosters mutual aid and systems change. With the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza for example, young people who don’t feel represented in mainstream media are getting their news directly from [citizen] journalists in Gaza on Telegram or Instagram. 

Rather than going into the story with an angle or an editorial direction, like a third-party journalist might, citizens are using their social platform to bear witness and share what is happening – to them and around them. You get to know this person. You get to know the people facing displacement, those who have lost family members. You’re hearing stories that allow you to see the humanity in an individual that you would otherwise never know.

Yeah ... but, honestly, everything does come back to the work. The reason that any community activist or organizer doesn’t burn out is because they are connected to their community. Their community cares for and fuels them.  I like to read, I like to write poetry, I like to draw, and the themes I gravitate towards are always inspired by community: people from every walk of life who are facing injustice but believe in a more just and equitable world. I also watch films and make documentaries. The one I’m working on right now is about the Palestinian diaspora. The films that I watch vary, obviously, but I do tend toward social justice themes. What else? I run ... I guess [laughs]. 

That’s a great question. There are songs, for sure, but I really tend toward visual art. There’s a piece I saw recently at the Toronto Palestine Film Festival by the Gazan artist Malak Mattar. It was a massive mural, just depicting scenes of devastation in Gaza. It’s awful in what it’s depicting, but I just sat there looking at it in silence for a long time. There are great pieces depicting liberation as well. There’s a Palestinian artist called Ismael Shammoutmut who did a lot of scenes imagining Palestine post-liberation. Those have been great as well, because when your reality doesn’t reflect the world that you want to be in, you can build it through art. 

Yeah, this happens a lot. People stop themselves. They think they have to know about every historical event, every international agreement, to be able to have an opinion. That’s not the case. I think, at the base of it, if you have an understanding of systems of injustice, of colonization, then you can map out the power dynamics at play. You just have to ask questions like: Who is the most resourced entity? Who holds the power? What are the injustices being perpetrated? People stop themselves because they perceive it to be complex and they don’t want to say the wrong thing, but we’re in an age of information where anybody can access, learn and carve out their own understanding and the role they want to play.