Meet Our Scholars

Sarah is a queer, genderfluid femme of color and the child of Muslim refugees. Working to better their communities through internal, interpersonal, and systems change has been vital to their resistance and existence. Sarah made the decision to pursue social work after reporting from refugee settlements abroad, where they intended to promote human rights through investigative journalism. Steadily, Sarah realized the limitation of a journalist’s work and felt called to a different kind of action. Since then, Sarah has dived into social work through several different avenues: performer in educational theater, abortion clinic escort, teaching artist in Chicago Public Schools, organizer with the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health, director of Take Back the Night at Northwestern University (where they also helped reform campus policy on sexual assault to be more inclusive of queer survivors). Of great importance to Sarah is the work they did as a Resource Advocate at the Broadway Youth Center from February 2015 – June 2017, where they supported queer and trans young people experiencing homelessness. While in school in Chicago, they will be interning at the Chicago Women’s Health Center, a feminist health care collective that serves people of all genders at a sliding scale. After graduating with their Master’s in Social Work from the University of Chicago in 2018, Sarah hopes to start a program for LGBTQ youth of color that integrates mental health care, popular education, and creative learning to provide youth access to activism, emotional tools, and life skills to succeed despite inequitable conditions. In our increasingly harmful world, Sarah is dedicated to supporting queer and trans youth as they learn to love themselves, radically and unapologetically, and gain a healthier understanding of their resilience and power.