Hidden Gems: Meet Sofia Azam

Today we’d like to introduce you to Sofia Azam.

Hi Sofia, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
Aida and I started this club during the summer of 2020 after our sophomore year of high school.

We felt that there was a severe lack of action in order to help stop the many injustices in our world and wanted to make a bigger impact on our community than simply reposting a graphic on Instagram. Therefore, the idea for “Afetiria” came. We wanted to hold service projects for our community in addition to helping others start their own projects, whether that be needing a platform to talk about issues or wanting to raise money for an organization they find impactful.

We decided to call our club “Afetiria”, which stems from the Greek word αφετηρία (or afetiría), meaning “starting point”. Thus, our motto: A starting point to making changes big and small.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
There were definitely some challenges when we were first creating our club.

Me, Aida, and our vice president at the time, Emily Chen, were taking on multiple jobs such as running our Instagram page, creating and updating our website, planning out events, and still figuring out how to structure our club. Even when we were reviewing candidates for our board, we spent a lot of time with interviews, reviewing their applications, and then eventually choosing our board. There also were times when we would plan out projects a bit last minute.

Our club holds monthly projects that we announce to our members during general meetings, so when we would plan out these projects at the very last minute, we wouldn’t have a lot of details figured out. However, after the first couple of months, we were able to efficiently plan out projects, events, meetings, and communicate!

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Afetiria is a youth-led organization dedicated to making changes big and small, practicing intersectionality, and helping communities around us do so as well. We hold monthly service projects in hopes to make a positive impact on our world. We also help individuals start their own projects by promoting their projects through our social media, including our Instagram and our website, or help organize their ideas for events that they have.

This is what mainly sets us apart from other service-oriented clubs; we help individuals start their own projects. Some of these member-led projects have included donation drives and advocacy posts on our Instagram. We wanted to do this because we felt that there could be high schoolers, such as ourselves, who wanted to start their own projects but don’t know where to start.

I’m very proud of the number of projects we have been able to complete and everything else that we have accomplished this past year and a half. We have raised about $500 total in mutual aid from our projects including bake sales, a yard sale, and an art market. Additionally, we have hosted donation drives for menstrual products, a phone banking/emailing event to stop Uyghur forced labor, a series of mental health webinars, and many other types of projects.

What’s next?
We are continuing to plan out monthly events and will be starting a new recurring event which is our book club.

Additionally, we are looking for new board members as well as general members to join our club because the majority of our current board members and general members are seniors in high school.

Therefore, a lot of us won’t be able to continue being a part of the club/leading it.

Contact Info:

• Email: theafeitira@gmail.com
• Website: https://afetiria.wixsite.com/website
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theafetiria/
• Other: https://linktr.ee/afetiria

Image Credits
Aida Guo