Rayaan Ahmed on her 2021-22 Knapp Fellowship
When Rayaan Ahmed learned about the Knapp Fellowship, she immediately wanted to explore the connection between mutual aid work in her families hometown in Somalia and her childhood home of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Ahmed's mother came to Minneapolis as a refugee in 1992, a year after the Somali Civil War broke out. Though Ahmed was not alive during this period of war, she grew up hearing stories of her mothers experience. The same year Ahmed's mother arrived in the US, an estimated 350,000 Somalis died of disease, starvation, and other consequences of the civil war. Despite this painful truth, many Somali communities formed a system of aid in which each person taught each other skills that became critical to their survival and, Ahmed says, "when individuals like my mother left, she took those values with her." Inspired by this history, Ahmed's project Prosperity Together: We Keep Us Safe aims to bridge the understanding of mutual aid from wealth redistribution to broadening the distribution of skills and support.
In the midst of the COVID19 pandemic, Ahmed couldn't help but draw connections between her families experience with mutual aid and the community movements happening in the US, particularly in Minneapolis after the brutal murder of George Floyd. The uprisings that followed took place in the most densely populated and low-income populations and left many in the community without access to important necessities. In response, communities in the Twin Cities mobilized around the shared importance of mutual aid. While the concept was new to many non-immigrant communities, Ahmed saw how the local Somali community stepped in and taught people the way. Mutual aid has little known history in Somalia; in the wake of the civil war, Ahmed describes how, "schools turned into places where students and families found refuge. The school became a sanctuary amid war, individuals used their everyday skills to protect each other from harm but focused on growth, gardener would teach plumber and plumber teach doctors."
All of these tragedies have highlighted the importance of community and building a long-standing relationship between each other in times of crisis. Now more than ever when one person in our community is struggling, Ahmed says, "we can come together and support them on multiple different levels. We have developed new and innovative ways of ensuring each other's safety from refined grocery delivery services to community gardens."
Ahmed's project is creating a bridge between the Lutheran Social Service (LSS) Imhotep Freedom School in Minnesota and the Al-Aqsa after school program, a similar school program in Mogadishu, Somalia. The Imhotep Freedom School built a year-round youth center dedicated to helping encourage young people to look beyond themselves to make a difference in their communities. Over the course of the upcoming year, she plans to work with students in this center to deepen their understanding of how community service can fundamentally shape the future of their communities.
With the same perseverance that her parents had in navigating a new country with a young daughter, Ahmed transforms adversity into activism.
Learn more about the Knapp Fellowship for Entrepreneurial Service-Learning.
