Hockaday Persian Immersion Raises Funds, Awareness
About 50 students and parents from The Hockaday School filled junior Sophia Afzalipour’s Preston Hollow home on an early February evening to share an Iranian meal.
The school’s Persian Immersion Club held the dinner to raise funds and awareness for women’s rights protests in Iran. A total of $2,500 was raised and donated to United For Iran, an organization that develops apps to enhance civic engagement and government transparency.
“This year, there’s been a shift in our mission,” Afzalipour said. “With the ongoing violence in Iran, we wanted to bring that to our club and see what we can do to inform our peers.”
The Persian Immersion Club was founded last academic year by Afzalipour, who runs the organization alongside juniors Yalda Haghighat and Leila, who requested to omit her last name to protect her family’s safety from the Iranian totalitarian regime.
“There’s typically a stereotype that’s associated with the Middle East and Iran, so we wanted to share the aspects of our culture that we know and love with our peers so that they can be better informed, and we can also build empathy and a greater understanding of the culture,” Leila said.
Leading up to the fundraising dinner, the trio met with Hockaday’s director of social impact to determine the best way for the campus to support the protesters in Iran. They landed on a dinner because Iranian food tends to be a fan favorite.
The organization leaders gave speeches and created a dialogue about what’s happening, where the money is going, and why they’re participating in advocacy work. The meal included catered and cooked food to share their culture and raise money through ticket sales and other donations.
Both those involved in the club and other campus community members came out to support the cause.
“It was very cool because we had a lot of people we had never seen before, so it was crazy how the word spread,” Afzalipour said.
Aside from the dinner, the organization meets regularly to create empathy-centered programming covering topics such as Persian New Year, food from local Iranian restaurants, the women’s rights conflicts in Iran, and more.
“A lot of our members are not Iranian, so that’s the goal is to have different demographics, different backgrounds, engaging with our culture and experiencing it through their own lens,” Leila said.
The organization plans to continue its advocacy through campus events and participation in a future social impact bazaar.
“The whole point of us wanting to do this is to create awareness and keep people informed because this is [far] from over, and there are so many people who need help and need their voices heard,” Haghighat said.
