Afghan Coalition Announcements

Homaira Hosseini

A longtime volunteer with the Afghan Coalition and a community activist, Homaira Hosseini, was recently selected as the student speaker for the UCLA College of Letters and Science graduation ceremony, to be held at Pauley Pavilion on Friday, June 12. “Actions speak louder than words. You need to do as much as you say you are going to do. Never do anything you won’t be proud of,” says Homaira Hosseini, a political science major and UCLA’s student body president.

As a youth coordinator for the Afghan Coalition, Homaira helped the Afghan community locally in Fremont, where she grew up, while also raising funds to help Afghan women and children in Afghanistan who were victims of war.

When Homaira Hosseini was just 2 years old, Soviet troops invaded her native Afghanistan and imprisoned her father, who was a justice of the nation’s highest court. Her father escaped and the family fled to India, then on to the United States when she was 4. They settled in Fremont, California, a Bay Area community with the largest Afghan population of any U.S. city.

Her experience with the indignation of poverty, culture shock, discrimination and disempowerment by language barriers, gave her an early appreciation of the hardships her family had escaped and a desire to help those left behind.

In 1994, at the age of 7, she returned to Afghanistan to visit family. There she witnessed the devastation of war and visited a refugee camp, a Taliban-controlled school and an excavated mass grave of skulls and bones.

“I learned very early on that I was destined to aid people afflicted by the scourge of conflict and injustice,” she said. “As a victim of war, I knew that I held sole responsibility for my success in life.”

Homaira Hosseini says her experience traveling back to Afghanistan has continued to be her source of motivation throughout her life pursuits in education and community service and her commitment to being an architect of positive change.

At UCLA, she helped coordinate the first “Thinking Globally, Acting Locally” conference, which focused on raising student awareness about international poverty and oppression.

She has also been deeply involved in student-initiated community service programs at UCLA, including the Incarcerated Youth Tutorial Program and Mentoring for Academic and Peer Support, a program through which she provides academic guidance and personal support to students at Jordan High School in Watts.

Homaira Hosseini also helped establish a program pairing underclassmen with upperclassmen mentors at UCLA. As student body president, she has sought avenues to help students who are disadvantaged and give students a voice.

Her key achievements have been developing a tuition installment plan for students, a program that will likely go into effect next year; establishing Bruins in the City, which works with the city of Los Angeles to place students on city commissions; and organizing the first BruINTENT event to raise student awareness about homelessness in Los Angeles, and even on the UCLA campus.

As for her immediate plans after graduation, she has been selected to participate in the prestigious Coro Fellow leadership training program close to home in San Francisco next year. She eventually plans to attend law and public policy school.

Read the full press release here on the UCLA Web site.

www.ucla.edu

Student spotlight: spotlight.ucla.edu