Semiahmoo Secondary’s InterAct Club (represented by Fara Shah)

“As students, we all have a thirst for knowledge and also for helping others; by linking the two passions together, Semiahmoo Secondary’s InterAct Club has been able to lead a chain of successful campaigns, thus making an impact within our community. Essentially, as the youth, and the future of our global society, we have taken the responsibility of improving issues that matter to us.”

 

The Semiahmoo International Action Club (InterAct for short) at Semiahmoo Secondary School in Surrey is a youth initiative aimed not only at global and community-based work, but also at educating students to understand the world around them.

 

The club is made up of 60 to 70 high school students between 15 and 18 years of age. It organizes local events ranging from the annual Carnival and Lend-a-Hand garbage clean-up, to the successful food drive, “Halloween for Hunger,” for the food bank. The club also does one major global initiative a year, and works in partnership with the non-profit organization ACCES Kenya, which is dedicated to providing Africans with better access to education.

 

The club is led by Fara Shah, a grade 12 student, who is passionate about social justice issues. Fara first got involved in humanitarian and activist work because she grew up with stories of political struggle as experienced first-hand by her parents and their friends, who are Afghan refugees from the 1979 Soviet invasion: “I received a reality check at a very young age, as I learned about global injustices from my parents. This sparked a passion in me to do international advocacy work.”

 

Fara combines this commitment to international development with her thirst for knowledge: “Ask me anything, and I’ll know something about it!” She takes seriously her responsibility to become informed about the world around her, and to then translate that knowledge into action. It is this conviction that drives her leadership of the InterAct Club.

 

One of the strengths of the club, according to Fara, is just how multicultural and diverse it is: “If you ask any person in the InterAct Club, they’ll say that being in a club where diversity is encouraged and promoted really helps you learn a lot about what’s happening globally and it sparks a passion within you.”

 

And it’s this passion at the heart of the club’s members that really drives the club forward. Fara is just amazed at the genuine desire that the kids have to really make a difference: “A lot of them are trying to take the initiative, a lot of them want to learn what is actually happening.” Fara feels that this passion will translate into great things for the club in the future.

 

To other Canadian youth who are trying to make a difference, Fara has this to say: “The hardest thing to do is just to take the first step. Find something you’re passionate about – it doesn’t have to be something that is on the front cover of The Economist or what is CNN’s headline for the past month. Just find something that is personal to you, something that you can see yourself genuinely advocating for. So once you find something you’re passionate about, really advocating and campaigning for it will just come so naturally. It will all come to you what you need to do and how you need to do it.”