From Student Activist to Intersectional Labor Organizer: Meet Yasmin Ahmed

Submitted by Nell Gross on

Like many first-year college students, Yasmin Ahmed, who uses they/them pronouns, suffered from a bit of imposter syndrome when they arrived at UW in 2014.

Although Yasmin was born in Seattle, they hadn’t been in the Pacific Northwest since they were a small child.

Their family lived first in Muscat, Oman—where they recall playing in canals, studying Arabic and caring for stray cats—and later in Chang Mai, Thailand, where instead of snow days they took what students colloquially dubbed “coup days” off from school, and which they consider home.

Unfamiliar with American youth culture and knowing almost no one on campus, Yasmin sought to make friends and meet like-minded people by joining their roommate at a Huskies for Food Justice meeting.

There, students were advocating for ecologically sustainable, locally sourced and humanely produced food to be served in student dining facilities.

Yasmin didn’t know it yet, but not only had they had found like-minded people, they had found their calling and their career path.

Now the Assistant Director of Student and Community Engagement at the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies, Yasmin has mostly learned to cope with imposter syndrome, operating instead from an intersectional perspective that informs their work to bring visibility to labor issues through intentional partnerships with the UW community and labor organizations.

Full Article from The Whole U

Share