Projects

This one starts a long time before it was ever an organisation. I met Sohail while living on campus at GC University — he's vision impaired, and back then he needed someone to read his lessons aloud and record the answers to the questions at the end of each one. He'd keep those recordings and use them to prepare. I was the one reading.

That's how the friendship actually started — not a grand plan, just one person needing help and another person showing up regularly enough that it became routine, then became trust.

Years later, Sohail — who by then was teaching at GC University himself — called me. He wanted to formalise something we'd both seen up close for years: kids with vision impairment at GCU who had the ability to get through high school and university, but not the support structure to actually do it. That call became WADA.

We built it slowly — local partners, families, educators, funding where we could find it, advocacy where we couldn't. It's not the kind of work that shows results quickly. Four students have graduated high school and gone on to university through WADA so far. In the context we're working in, that number represents something real.

This started with an article in Express Tribune, a Pakistani newspaper. A group of Pakistani expats in Boston had started something called Pakathon, and the piece mentioned they were looking to expand into Australia. I was new to Melbourne at the time — my network was basically a handful of people I knew from university, nothing more.

I reached out anyway. Then I started going from one person to the next, looking for anyone willing to help build a chapter here from nothing. No existing team, no existing audience, just persistence and a lot of cold conversations.

It grew into a genuine movement. We ran events across Melbourne — bringing the Pakistani diaspora together around entrepreneurship and social impact, managing everything from vendor procurement to stakeholder engagement to volunteer coordination ourselves. What started as one person following up on a newspaper article became a chapter that actually delivered.