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Community Corner

Glenview Isma'ili Muslim Community Prepares for Partnership Walk

Volunteerism in the Isma'ili community runs strong for the upcoming 13th annual Walk at Millennium Park.

Ethan Gillani is selling t-shirts today at the Glenview Isma’ili Center where he attends services. The t-shirts are white with an outline of the Al-Azhar Park in Cairo that was developed by a segment of the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) and opened to the public in 2005. The kids that buy the t-shirts will go home and color them with washable markers, decorating the shirts with other AKDN projects they’ve learned about. They will all wear them on the same day: September 18, the day of the 13th annual Chicago Partnership Walk.

Gillani, a junior at Northwestern University, has been helping out with the Walk as a volunteer in some capacity or another since the first Partnership Walk in Chicago in 1998. In fact, most of the Chicagoland Isma’ili community has been involved with the Walk since then. As followers of His Highness the Aga Khan, whose Aga Khan Foundation (a sister institution of the AKDN) developed the Walk, the Isma’ili Muslim community in all Walk cities have been a consistent network of volunteers to help the Walk grow over the years, though you won’t hear too much about them.

After all, they are followers of a leader who stated in his first American interview with MSNBC that “the work should speak rather than the individual.”

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The work does speak, and it speaks loudly. AKDN and the Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) together have developed hundreds of projects for peoples in Asia and Africa. The projects focus on five different areas: health, education, rural development, civil society and environment. The money raised by Partnership Walks across North America are invested in these institutions and used to work towards ending global poverty.

“Everyone knows someone who has breast cancer or autism,” says Gillani. “But rarely do people here know someone who is suffering from global poverty. So it can be difficult to help people find a connection to the cause.”

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Despite challenges, Gillani and some of his friends found a way to form a 127-person team for the Walk in 2007 and decided to call his team ‘Show Me Da Money’ (“I know it sounds lame, but it worked,” he says). They used pick-up basketball and cricket games to make their friends aware of the Walk and to raise money. The team helped draw walkers on the day of the Walk by strolling around and telling people about the work of AKF.

Zahra Lalani, another member of the Glenview Isma’ili congregation now a freshmen at Indiana University, did the same thing with her team, Interact, from Adlai Stenvenson High School, which raised almost $700. Deemed “human factoids,” they wore posters around the walk with statistics about global poverty.

According to Ayaz Merchant, Libertyville-based vice chairman of the Midwest AKF office, the passion of youth volunteers is precisely what draws people to the Walk every year.

“It’s not just a Walk,” he explains. “It’s thoughtful discussions, it’s entertainment, it’s a volunteering opportunity for the youth. Seeing new volunteers develop a passion for the cause during Walk preparation is amazing. They become fans for life.”

This year’s Walk should see almost 3,000 people pass through. It will be held at Millennium Park in Chicago on Saturday, September 18 and, like always, will provide lots of entertainment, including a free concert of the Legendary Drifters, Footworkingz from MTV’s Best Dance Crew and The Jesse White Tumbling Team.

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