Aleena’s been a proud village auntie to SAYge since 2020, sometimes supporting SAYge’s upbringing from the periphery, other times rolling up her sleeves and getting her hands dirty. Her work today is inspired by her own life experiences.

Growing up (in the pre-internet days), Aleena observed her transcontinental family engage people of seemingly disparate villages to come together again and again to ensure her safety, nurture her curiosity, and empower her to grow. She often accompanied family members as they leveraged this entrepreneurial spirit to carefully cultivate small business ventures. Within her own multigenerational home, she was immersed in collective stories that rooted her in generations of community building across multiple continents. Through global migration, ethnic violence, suicide attempts, affinity crimes, and prejudice, she experienced resilience and successes happen because of the values and villages her family embraced. In undergrad, she explored how social, structural, and systemic inequities connected recurring stories to global systems. She realized the ultimate cost of these patterns was health. This led her to a career in global health and development. Eventually, she detoured into nursing to gain a hands-on health/science education and to understand global systems from the frontlines. In this role, she strategized care in “village health” settings for tens-of-thousands of people from diverse walks of life, experiencing the extremes of the human condition, during vulnerable parts of their stories. Aleena’s now pivoting back to global development and is using her embodied wisdom to build, connect, and evolve multi-sectional “village coalitions” so that women around the globe can lead healthier lives within healthier ecosystems, regardless of location or circumstance.