Mentoring Youth in Rainier Vista

Yasmin Habib created a nonprofit program to serve refugee, immigrant and marginalized children in the Rainier Vista community. The World Mind Creation Academy features after-school programs to explore cultural identity, develop leadership skills and build community.

Serving Youth in Rainier Vista

BY NANCY JOSEPH

YASMIN HABIB has been on many journeys. From Somalia to Kenya as a small child. From a Kenyan refugee camp to the U.S. at age 5. From city to city as her family sought opportunities in America. But Habib’s most challenging journey has been veering from the path expected of her—a career in medicine—to a path that felt right.

“

THE ONLY THING THAT BECAME IMPORTANT WAS

BEING HAPPY AGAIN,

FEELING NORMAL . THE

DEPRESSION FORCED ME TO

SPEAK MY TRUTH.

— Yasmin Habib

Today Habib, ’14, is founder and director of World Mind Creation Academy, a nonprofit for refugee, immigrant and other marginalized youth in South Seattle. She created the academy in 2014 and three years later received a major grant from King County’s Best Starts for Kids initiative to expand the program. But those successes belie the challenges Habib encountered along the way.

When she arrived at the UW, Habib had an impeccable academic record. Valedictorian of her high school in Kent, she had long planned to become a physician. But her pre-med courses didn’t excite her, and a medical-dental summer program after her sophomore year confirmed that she did not want to be a doctor. It was a difficult realization.

“My family sacrificed a lot,” Habib says. “The best thing to an immigrant mom and dad is for their child to be a doctor, because everybody needs doctors … For a long time I convinced myself that’s what I wanted to do.”

Habib fell into a depression. She took time off from school and moved back home. Telling her parents she did not want to be a doctor “was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do,” she recalls. “But I was already at the lowest I could be, and the only thing that became important was being happy again, feeling normal. The depression forced me to speak my truth.”

She remembered liking an anthropology class. When she returned to campus, she decided to take more, including a anthropology service-learning course that involved tutoring Somali children at a local nonprofit. “That was a huge turning point,” she says. Being around Somali youth felt familiar, as did the children’s focus on academic success. Habib saw herself in those students and understood the intense pressure they felt to succeed.