CDYR Winter 2022 Newsletter
Hello CDYR community! We’ve been working on some big things for the past few months, and we’re thrilled to share them with you below.
New Collective Members!
We welcomed 3 new members to the CDYR Collective this past year. The collective is a team of youth and adult allies working to advance our core mission of developing and supporting youth leadership in the Chicago Desi community. We are so grateful and excited to have the three of you on the collective <3
Rani Gordon (she/her)
Born and raised in Chicago, Rani first got involved with CDYR as a retreat participant in the summer of 2018, and loved it so much that she returned in 2019. She feels very grateful for finding a home within the CDYR community that helped ground her in her values and allowed her to learn, grow, and explore her identity as a mixed person of Punjabi and Ashkenazi Jewish descent. Rani has remained connected to CDYR and excitedly joined the collective in 2021.
Misha Gandhi (she/her)
Misha Gandhi is a senior in highschool. She has lived in the suburbs all her life and first got involved in CDYR in 2020. She attended the annual summer cohort in 2020 and felt deeply connected to the safe space she was provided as well as the support she was given by the other youth and collective members. With the action grant she was given after the cohort, she started a small instagram business to hand make envelopes to fundraise for different non-profits. She continues to pursue passion projects as she painted the Love Fridge at Indo-American Center, received training for gender based violence by Kan-Win, helped pass TEAACH Act with a focus group by Hana Center, fundraises for her highschool's Dance Marathon initiative and is the president of her school's South Asian Student Association. She is currently interning at Sparkle Insights; a market research company dedicated to Asian American representation.
Naoman Arif (he/him)
Naoman Arif was born and raised in the DC metropolitan area in the suburbs of northern VA. He moved to Chicago for college and graduated from the University of Chicago in 2020 with a BA in Biology. He is currently a Clinical Research Coordinator for the Critical Care department at Comer Children’s Hospital, working on projects aimed at better understanding and improving the experiences of children and families who go through the pediatric ICU. He attended the 2018 Retreat as a Youth Participant and was inspired by the work done by CDYR in providing South Asian youth with the opportunity to learn and grow the necessary skills to enact transformative change in their communities. He hopes to contribute to CDYR’s overall mission of providing a culturally-grounded space for Chicago’s youth to achieve their full potential as leaders in working towards justice.
Click here to meet the entire collective team.
CDYR 2022 Collective Retreat!!!
From November 19-21st, we held our annual Collective Retreat! We took this weekend to bond, reflect, onboard new collective members and brainstorm CDYR’s next steps! This weekend allowed us to deeply reimagine CDYR’s current structure, and we look forward to announcing our new ideas in the following months, so stay tuned!
New Grants
CDYR is at a turning point, as we continue to expand our focus to include year-round mobilization for youth justice. We’re excited to announce that we’ve received two grants funds from two partners to support our operations. These include $6,000 from the Charter Oak Foundation to increase general operational capacity and $500 from the Mayers and Moria Kaplan Family for youth organizing work.
We’re very grateful to these co-conspirators for having our back as we move to the next stage of our work. And…look out for our new plans in the near future!
Support Our Work
We rely on the community’s support to carry out our work. Please follow this link if you’re able to donate to us. Recurring monthly donations are now possible!
