Journey Story: Zahra Jamal
We first trained Zahra Jamal, the Associate Director at Rice University's Boniuk Institute for Religious Tolerance, in Houston in 2018, and have continued to work with her since on building her media presence. We worked with Zahra to improve her expert profile online, develop content to pitch and find news hooks to tie it to, and prepare for on-camera interviews.
Since the training, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy magazine, Slate, and The Hill. We also worked with her to get the attention of a producer at BBC World News, leading to a live interview. The segment aired both on BBC World (with 101 million listeners per week) and CBC Radio One (with 7.7 million listeners per month). It also reached 7,300 people through Zahra’s social media posts.
“Thank you for believing in me and helping me believe in myself,” Zahra said after the segment. “I am so grateful, as a woman of color and religious minority, to finally have the training and chance to amplify my voice despite its co-optation by others for decades."