President Barack Obama hosts an Iftar dinner celebrating Ramadan in the East Room of the White House, June 22, 2015. Among the attendees was local teen Ziad Ahmed, pictured fourth from the right of the President. Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson.
All the cases over the last year on racial profiling which dominated the news cycle, inspired 16-year-old Princeton Day School student Ziad Ahmed to launch a concerted campaign to engage teens to speak out against racism. Using redefy as a platform, Ahmed launched campaigns this year to raise awareness on issues related to race.
Redefy was founded by Ahmed at the age of 14. Their mission is to defy stereotypes, redefine perspectives positively and create an engaged community. This year, Ahmed launched VOICES, a conversation series which seeks to engage teens on current events and social justice issues to inspire teen activism. VOICES has hosted teen forums on racial profiling, LGBT rights and on the social justice priorities of the 2016 Presidential candidates. VOICES is hosted at the Princeton Public Library by redefy, the Princeton Public Library Teen Advisory Board, and Not in Our Town – Princeton.
In April of 2015, Ahmed launched #PrincetonAgainstRacism, a social media campaign to inspire Princeton residents to take a public stand against racism using this hashtag. Ahmed and his leadership team at redefy took over 125 portraits of people at Princeton Day School and Princeton’s Communiversity street fair asking people to finish the prompt “I stand against racism because…”
Redefy spearheaded the effort – they tweeted, facebooked, instagrammed, and tumbled the hashtag and portraits across all of these social media platforms with the goal of inspiring teens everywhere to take a stand against racism. Redefy led this initiative in partnership with Princeton CHOOSE and Not in Our Town – Princeton in recognition of the YWCA’s Stand Against Racism campaign.
On June 22, 2015, Ahmed was invited to dine with President Obama at the White House Iftar. Iftar is the breaking of fast at sunset observed by Muslims during the month of Ramadan.
Currently Ahmed and his leadership team at redefy are working on their Clean Air Campaign which is an effort to rid our vocabularies of derogatory terms, racial slurs, and words and phrases, which belittle populations. They are creating a video which will feature a diverse group of people requesting society to refrain from the use of derogatory terms. All those featured in the video will end by stating their name and vowing to keep the air clean.
Ahmed intends to promote the video through their strong presence on various social media platforms. The Clean Air Campaign is inspired by Cierra Moore’s redefy article entitled “Clean Air.”
At the age of 16, Ahmed is a young leader out to change the world one teenager at a time. He engages in this work with quiet determination seeking only the reward of an open mind. Ahmed has a collaborative style and formed a leadership team of like-minded teenagers to help him carry out redefy’s mission. His young leadership team includes Lara Strassberg, Cierra Moore, Michael Zhao, Ziyad Khan, Nick Jain and Julia Marshall.
To learn more visit redefy.org.
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