Rising Stars: Meet Arizona Youth Against Hate

Today we’d like to introduce you to Arizona Youth Against Hate.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
Our organization was founded by 3 Asian American high school students, who felt hopeless about the rise in hate crimes against Asian American. In order to be proactive in our community, we formed Arizona Youth Against Hate. We put out weekly Instagram content related to hate crimes including how to report hate crimes in different cities and overall raising awareness about hate crimes and hate incidents. Our goal is to help minorities throughout our community in any way possible, whether that be through creating a stand alone hate crime law, or helping local nonprofits on the ground. We believe in the power of the younger generation and we seek to make real change. Our main priority is to recruit passionate youth across Arizona who are interested in combating hate towards all marginalized communities.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Some struggles along the way were shifting the goal of our organization after we found out that our initial goal of creating a stand alone hate crime law would hurt the communities they were supposed to protect. So doing a complete 180 and shifting got a more community focused initiative was definitely more difficult, but after talking to other community leaders, we have found the direction that we would like to go in.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
Since we are just getting started, one thing that we are most proud of is being able to switch our goals as an organization and essentially start from the bottom up. We were able to talk to different community leaders and thus change our path to benefit the community the most. What sets us apart from the others is how we really focus on getting the youth involved in our community by doing outreach to different schools and through social media.

Let’s talk about our city – what do you love? What do you not love?
What I like best about our city is our ability to come together in times of need and show solidarity in times of turmoil. What we like least about Phoenix is the excessive heat in the summer.

Contact Info:

• Email: arizonayouthagainsthate@gmail.com
• Instagram: azyouthagainsthate
• Other: TikTok: azyouthagainsth8