Executive Board

Co-Founder / Director of Partnerships

Sherin was inspired to found KRR to provide sustainable humanitarian solutions for Kurdish refugees in the Kurdistan Regional Government region. Her driving force has been to provide avenues for economic empowerment for Kurdish women and girls in the region. Sherin is a humanitarian activist based in San Diego who has led international development projects in Amman, Jordan. She received her B.A. in Government from Claremont McKenna College in 2017. Sherin has been published by the WSJ and featured in the San Diego Union Tribune and the Huffington Post. She has spoken on national platforms such as NPR Roundtable and NBC San Diego’s Political Talk.

Co-Founder / Director of Development

Yara’s involvement in numerous humanitarian projects and passion for social justice ultimately culminated in KRR’s unique mission. She is also actively mobilizing the Kurdish-American community to reinstate trust in individual activism and organizing’s impact through various avenues, primarily as the Chief Operating Officer of Effendi Foundation. She holds a B.A. in International Relations and Human Rights from Claremont McKenna College and is currently pursuing her J.D. at the New York University School of Law. She has shed light on these issues in platforms such as the Wall Street Journal, BBC, Huffington Post, VoA, Rudaw, and Kurdistan 24.

Co-Founder / Director of Operations

Shaped by her experience as a political refugee from Kurdistan, Arazoo co-founded KRR to empower refugees through equitable access to medical care. She completed her BS in Human Biology and Society from UCLA in 2019, where she advocated for survivors of gender-based violence and researched behavioral disorders. Arazoo is currently a second-year medical student at the Noorda College of Osteopathic Medicine in Utah.

Director of Administration

Gizem is passionate about addressing health inequities and women’s health. She is from Amed in Northern Kurdistan and grew up in the Bay Area, California. Witnessing the stark contrast in health services and resources in Kurdish cities as opposed to those in Western Turkey has pushed Gizem to advocate for vulnerable Kurdish communities. She got her BS in Human Biology from UC Santa Cruz and her MS in Global Health Sciences from UC San Francisco. Her family’s experience with obtaining asylum in the US led her to focus her master’s capstone research on investigating the barriers faced by clinicians providing evaluations to asylum-seekers in San Francisco.

Director of Fundraising

Laurella is a born and raised New Yorker with a passion for progressive politics and fundraising. She holds a B.A. in political science from Washington University in St. Louis, and is currently in her second year at New York University School of Law, where she is a staff editor for the Review of Law and Social Change. Prior to law school, Laurella worked as a senior fundraiser for Governor Kathy Hochul’s campaign, and as a sentencing mitigator for death penalty cases.