Leen Shumman is one of our two youth fellows this year, who has been with AAFSC for quite a long time. Leen’s mom, Nidal Alloubane, has been working with AAFSC for 14 years and first brought Leen in when she was 7 years old to participate in the youth after-school program. While in middle school she became a volunteer and started helping with the ESL program. Now, Leen is a junior at Brooklyn Collaborative Studies High School and hopes to use her fellowship with AAFSC to build campaigns around issues in her community that she feels most connected to, such as Islamophobia and gender-based discrimination. She hopes that through her fellowship she can bring attention to the importance of extending and making opportunities available to the female members of her community. Leen aspires to be a human rights lawyer and believes that the challenges facing Arabs and Muslims in this country inspired this desire, and thinks that law will be a good field through which she can make a change.
-Yasmina Ibrahim, Development and Communications Fellow