“ Understand your actions and the impact they have on others and honour your responsibility to ensure that impact is positive. ”
Shafaq Batool
TOP 30 UNDER 30 HONOUREE | 2026
About
PROFILE SNAPSHOT
AGE: 21
PRONOUNS: She/Her
HOMETOWN: Calgary, Alberta, Canada
CURRENT RESIDENCE: Calgary, Alberta, Canada
ORGANIZATIONS:
- Co-Founder of Khairiyat Women’s Health Equity Network
- Youth Advisor for the Canadian Commission for UNESCO
- 3M National Student Fellow for the Society of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
GLOBAL IMPACT FOCUS (SDGs)
I am most passionate about:
What specific issue(s) are you working to address, and what motivates you to do so?
- The issues I address stem from private conversations within my community, often held in trusted spaces and languages. As a child, I did not fully understand the tension between cultural preservation and assimilation, or the silence surrounding women’s health. This experience was shared by many who navigated inherited identities while building their own.
- Joining the Youth Advisory Group for the Canadian Commission for UNESCO made this commitment central to my work. Our mandate includes examining how advocacy is structured and how youth are engaged, focusing on patterns of inclusion, exclusion, and the default elevation of certain voices as ‘experts.’ I observed that advocacy often uses academic or policy language that alienates the communities it aims to support. At CCUNESCO, I worked to challenge this approach by designing youth engagement frameworks that prioritize collaboration and avoid replicating the barriers it creates.
- Co-founding Khairiyat was my first direct step toward addressing health inequities. Over time, Khairiyat became a space for open dialogue and meaningful connections, demonstrating the impact of intentional community engagement. By supporting the Catalyst Health Innovation Sprint at the University of Calgary, Khairiyat helped emerging health leaders prioritize health equity in their work.
- My advocacy now focuses on transforming educational structures. As a 2025 3M National Student Fellow, I collaborate on a national project to examine the design, funding, and experience of interdisciplinary university programs, with the goal of improving access to inclusive, decolonial learning pathways. This work highlights how traditional academic structures exclude first-generation, immigrant, and racialized students by devaluing community knowledge, non-linear educational paths, and collaborative leadership.
- Throughout my work, I am motivated by the belief that everyone deserves a voice in decisions that affect them, and that inclusion requires intentional effort. Building inclusive structures, adapting language, and sometimes reimagining systems are responsibilities I am committed to. I am guided by the understanding that my actions have impact, and that leadership means ensuring others are heard.
- Collectively, these efforts advance SDG 3, 4, 5, 10, and 17 by addressing health inequities, reimagining education, challenging systemic exclusion, and strengthening collaboration for meaningful participation.
What are the ways in which you curate connection?
- I curate connection by building spaces where people feel safe enough to speak in their own language, both literally and figuratively. Much of my work emerges from recognizing that trust is earned long before any “initiative” begins. With Khairiyat, this has meant starting with conversations in family and friends, in community centres, youth programs, and cultural groups, asking women and girls what they need rather than presuming I already know. The stakeholders in this work are layered: immigrant and newcomer families, cultural community leaders, youth program coordinators, health-care providers, and the young women who guide our programming through their lived experience.
- My role is to design systems that empower others, rather than seeking the spotlight. I balance my passion with community needs by treating each project as an iterative process. For example, workshops are co-created with youth facilitators and adapted each time based on participant feedback, including what felt uncomfortable, what was empowering, and what they wish they had learned earlier. At CCUNESCO, I apply this approach to youth governance. Together with other youth advisors, I have advocated for frameworks that move beyond token consultation to genuine co-decision-making, ensuring advocacy is shaped by those most affected, as demonstrated by our redesign of the Youth Mandate within the Governance Committee.
- Ultimately, curating connection means creating conditions for people to lead their own narratives. I see my role as removing barriers to make this possible.
What role will connection play in your future work?
- Connection will shape every horizon I move toward. In development work, it is the thread that holds the whole fabric together. Policy, programming, and strategy all fall flat when they are untethered from the people they claim to serve.
- In my future work, connection will serve as a form of accountability. It reminds me that my work ultimately belongs to the communities who will inherit it. Lasting change is built on relationships grounded in reciprocity.
- Harnessing the power of connection means designing solutions that endure beyond any individual. It involves creating pathways instead of isolated projects and building structures that others can adapt over time. These connections transform development work from intervention to stewardship.
- I believe connection can drive sustainable, inclusive development by restoring what large systems often overlook: dignity. When people see themselves in decision-making, they are more committed. Building alongside communities ensures our efforts endure beyond funding cycles and become lasting change.
- Connection is, and will remain, the steady force that transforms intention into lasting change.
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