In 2013—during the conflict that displaced millions of Syrian people, around a million of whom sought refuge in Lebanon—Manal Kahi left Beirut for NYC to attend graduate school. She planned to work in multilateral or environmental affairs, but her concern about the crisis back home and her dissatisfaction with grocery store hummus (clearly two very different issues) started her on a different journey. “You can …
Non-profit Impact Lebanon has suspended its regular fundraising to focus on a crowdfunding initiative to raise £5,000,000 in disaster relief for Beirut in the wake of yesterday’s catastrophic explosion. Dealing with an economic crisis, rolling blackouts and the global pandemic, Lebanese people were already facing immense hardship. With reports of deaths and injuries from the explosion increasing, some 300,000 residents in the city have also …
As activist and community organizer Adam Eli says in his debut book, The New Queer Conscience, “queer people anywhere are responsible for queer people everywhere.” This statement underlines every letter in LGBTQIA, an amalgamation of identities as bound together by their differences as they are by their shared outsider status. Those who have benefitted from decades’ worth of advancements (marriage equality included) must always remember …
