2015 Blueprints

Aditi Dinakar attended Creighton University, studied Economics, Health Administration, and Policy, with a minor in Public Policy. She was active in Creighton Students Union and enjoys writing legislation to improve the campus in student government. Aditi was also a programming intern for the Lieben Center for Women, the school’s women center. She is passionate about women’s representation, equal pay, cyberbullying legislation, and other social justice issues. In the future, Aditi would like to work at a non-profit or a public policy consulting firm, actively involved with social justice.

Adorie attended Stanford University. She is passionate about art and storytelling as a way to reclaim history, connect people across generations, and inspire collective action. She wants to learn more about the ways intergenerational trauma manifests itself, especially among historically marginalized groups, and how people can heal from this. Her involvement around campus has ranged from cofounding a developing Black Feminist Collective to advocating for improved mental health services. She aspires to develop a community program that would allow for communities, especially those of color and in poverty, to reclaim their power, resist, and reimagine the world we live in.

Afsana Akter is a youth climate activist. She has worked with the Alliance for Climate Education (ACE) and Global Kids. She was born in Bangladesh and moved to Brooklyn when she was ten years old. She is a graduate of Brooklyn School for the Collaborative Studies and attended Barnard College in New York City.

Aisling was a student at the University of Arkansas where they studied Psychology and Gender Studies. Aisling served as the president to the Student’s for Gender Equality on campus and is dedicated to advocating for social justice by combating forces of oppression such as transphobia, racism, homophobia, sexism, and ableism.

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Amanda was a Sociology major at Texas A&M University. She was a member of SAVE (Student Anti-Violence Educators), a peer education group that facilitated discussions on domestic violence, stalking, and sexual assault. She has served on a university sexual violence awareness committee and has appeared in her school’s public service announcements on the issue. She was a volunteer at a sexual assault resource center. Amanda is dedicated to teaching bystander intervention methods to students while promoting a safe campus culture. In addition to her victim advocacy, she was a research assistant in the Department of Sociology.

Amanda Perry is a painter, womanist, and student. Her experience growing up in a low-income family in the Bronx, New York has informed her passion for urban youth empowerment. Amanda is interested in work that focuses on education through the arts, food and housing justice, as well as economic empowerment. Amanda has also collaborated with other artists of color on projects that explore ideas of beauty, intersectionality, wellness in communities of color, and what it means to combat and process displacement.

Amir Rankin was the president of his school’s Gay and Straight Alliance, the bulldog for school events and one of the founding members of the student booster club. While he attended Pitt, Amir made it his goal to get involved and make a difference, and under his leadership, the GSA had several successful events such as “Ally Day” and “Awareness Week.” Amir’s philosophy is that we are all human living for love and happiness and with his tireless efforts he believes that he can accomplish every goal and overcome every hurdle until equality is reached for all.

Anagha Uppal was one of fifteen students in the Haslam Scholars Program, a selective honors scholarship program at the University of Tennessee. She aims to use the knowledge she earned through her self-directed Computational Social Science major to adopt technology in the development of community-based solutions to local issues. She was the training director for the local non-profit organization East Tennessee Peace & Justice Center. She also led two campus food justice campaigns and has participated in Clinton Global Initiative University and the Public Policy Challenge at her university, for which her team wrote a policy to increase nonpartisan youth voter turnout. She worked at her university Geographic Information Systems (GIS) research lab and wrote for the Amplifier, Knoxville’s street paper. She believes her familiarity with five languages may aid her in her future goals.

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