Rutgers Student Empowers Peers to Become Change Agents
Shaila Huq stresses the importance of advocacy, global citizenship
'Anyone can take action and actually affect change. Some people don’t realize they can write to their elected officials, and that our leaders do listen when we raise our voices.'Shaila Huq
Shaila Huq wore a corn costume to a Coldplay concert to bring awareness to global food distribution issues. And she spent last summer canvassing against genetically modified food and fracking.
“Becoming a global citizen is important to becoming a whole person,” says Huq, a Howell resident who graduated this month from Rutgers’ School of Arts and Sciences with a major in public health.
“Anyone can take action and actually affect change. Some people don’t realize they can write to their elected officials, and that our leaders do listen when we raise our voices.”
Though her activism presents itself in many ways, the common thread is Huq’s desire to impact the lives of others, even those halfway across the world, and the grassroots approach she honed at Rutgers.
As a member of the student advisory board for ONE.org, an international campaigning and advocacy organization, Huq is a leader among college students across the country who are active in the fight against extreme poverty and preventable disease. Whether she’s engaging others regarding women’s equality, consumer rights or environmental preservation, she has a knack for mobilizing teams of advocates and empowered citizens.
Activism is not exactly what her parents envisioned for her. They emphasized the importance of education, but encouraged their daughter to take a conventional path to success.
“They believed my contribution to society would be through becoming a doctor. They want me to be happy, but they also want me to be stable and comfortable,” Huq says.
Her father is a survivor of the Bangladesh liberation war and her mother is from Mauritius, where women of color were not eligible for education due to a culture steeped in racism, classism and sexism, according to Huq. Both parents left their homes at a young age and sacrificed everything they knew to rise above their circumstances.
Although her parents encouraged her down a different career path, their influence may be observed through Huq’s passion for advocacy. Her parents instilled in her a love of reading and she says the lessons she took from her favorite book series, Harry Potter and The Babysitters Club, inspired her to be more selfless and humble.
During middle school, Huq remembers feeling “a ball of empathy building in the pit of [her] stomach” while watching a video about seal skinning that introduced her to the concept of animal cruelty. She also learned at a young age that activism isn’t the most comfortable path – she was teased, discouraged and even bullied for her zealotry.
“There was a lot of noise from friends and even strangers telling me it wasn’t worth it to advocate for causes, that it was useless,” Huq says.
But that never stopped her. She arrived at Rutgers determined to be a more active change agent and chose to major in public health, particularly epidemiology with an emphasis on preventive methods and health-related public policy.
Her concern about the ocean's inhabitants led her to Kay Bidle’s “Introduction to Oceanography” course during her first year.
“[Shaila] did very well in the class and, as a public health major, she naturally gravitated toward the biology content,” says Bidle, a professor in the Department of Marine and Coastal Science.
When the oceanography course was over, Huq asked to do more hands-on research on phytoplankton. Bidle and his colleague, V. Monica Bricelj, arranged and co-advised her research on a harmful algal bloom called Alexandrium during her sophomore and junior years.
Bidle says Huq unlocked her leadership potential by serving as a first-year interest group seminar (FIGS) peer mentor to new students in the sciences. “She’s proactive and passionate. Her variety of talents is well-suited to interface and advocate for science,” he acknowledged.
In addition to her work with ONE.org, Huq is also an organizer with Food and Water Watch and led Rutgers’ Take Back the Tap campaign, which addresses privatization of water and aims for the university to become a bottle-free environment.
Her efforts have not gone unnoticed. Huq was invited to ONE Girls & Women’s first AYA Summit at Google’s Washington, D.C., headquarters in October 2014. Named after a hardy West African fern, “AYA” represents endurance and resourcefulness.
During the conference, which addressed empowering women and girls in developing countries, she met one of the escapees from a Boko Haram massacre in Nigeria.
“I sat there listening to her as she told us about the atrocities," Huq said. "She was so strong and still runs the risk of retaliation, so she uses a pseudonym. I have much less to risk. I should be more than willing to fight.”
Huq ultimately hopes to lead a world-class, policymaking advocacy organization and says she will continue to hold leaders accountable for the promises they make. Her current charge is to expand her own cultural competence, which she sees as necessary for any international activist.
“There’s no ‘Western savior complex’ here. We are equivalent to the people we serve,’’ Huq says. “We must not forget that.”