Radical Inclusion & Racial Justice (Instagram Live)

Radical Inclusion & Racial Justice: How Youth Activists Are Fighting Racial Inequity And Winning

Mosaic supports young activists by equipping them with tools and resources to create lasting systemic change in their communities. For National Week of Conversations, we’re going live on Instagram (@mosaicpower) with Mena Ayazi, Peilin Lu, and Zoë Jenkins, three incredible youth activists, for a conversation centered on racial justice, equity, and inclusion. Our speakers will be discussing, among other topics, how they’ve succeeded in changing perceptions around race, working and leading in this space with adults, and developing tactics for change.

Please see below for more information on our speakers:

Peilin Lu is an 18 year-old organizer, facilitator, and young historian from Syracuse, New York. As a first-generation Chinese-American, Peilin is always looking for radical ways to foster equity, empathy, and bridge-building through her work. She is the Founder and President of her school district’s first Diversity Coalition, a member of the Syracuse Asian Student Alliance, a student facilitator of Community-Wide Dialogue, and an Ambassador for Human Rights for the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation. Peilin’s work has been recognized by the National History Day Asian-American History Prize, the University of Rochester’s Frederick Douglass & Susan B. Anthony Award, and the Princeton Prize in Race Relations. She will be attending Yale University in fall of 2022, where she hopes to study Politics, Ethics, & Economics and History.

Zoë Jenkins is an 18-year-old empathy and education practitioner. Zoë is the founder of the Get Schooled podcast and advisor for the Kentucky Student Voice Team. As a part of her podcasting work, she was named a 2020 National Geographic Young Explorer. Zoë also works with Civics Unplugged through Unplugged Strategies  to empower Generation Z to be civic innovators. Zoë also founded DICCE, which creates curriculum and resources for Generation Z to be more culturally responsive, empathetic, and equity-driven. Zoë has facilitated workshops with various groups including Stanford’s d.school and The Nobel Prize, been featured in The Washington Post and NPR’s All Things Considered, and was named a 2021 Aerie Changemaker. She is a first year student at the University of Virginia.

Mena Ayazi is a young peacebuilder with experience in organizing diaspora and youth advocates for peace and justice. She is currently a Program Officer with the Children and Youth division at Search for Common Ground (SFCG) where she supports Search’s global and U.S. based Youth, Peace and Security (YPS) advocacy, youth programming, youth protection, youth advocacy training, and serves as a Co-Chair of the U.S. YPS Coalition. As Co-Chair of the U.S. YPS Coalition, Mena helped craft and leads advocacy on the first policy introduced on YPS, H.R. 4838 the Youth, Peace and Security Act in the United States Congress. Mena’s main focuses on YPS include protection of youth activists in civic spaces, cultivating transnational youth capacity and collective action for peace advocacy, and LGBTQIA+ youth inclusion. Mena actively works with the Afghan-American community to engage the Afghan diaspora in transnational peacebuilding and American politics. She received both her BA and MS in Conflict Analysis and Resolution from George Mason University.