Imagine being forced to leave your home right now. Saying goodbye to the life you once knew — the home you love, the city you navigate like the back of your hand, the country you’ve known for so long. Imagine walking past your neighbor’s door for the last time and taking your final steps on the street you’ve walked along countless times. Imagine the immense pressure of deciding within minutes where the next chapter of your life will unfold. Imagine this all happening because your people face systematic persecution and mass killings right in front of your eyes. You fear…

“If I hadn’t resisted, we wouldn’t have survived.” That is how Ani Avetisyan rightly justified her decision to defend her children and herself against Nasimi Musayev, an armed Azerbaijani soldier who had illegally crossed Armenia’s border. He held her children at gunpoint in their home in Shaki — a village in Armenia’s southeastern Syunik Province, roughly twelve miles from Armenia’s border with Azerbaijan. Avetisyan was at a hotel in the nearby town of Sisian when one of her children called to say someone had broken into their home. Avetisyan immediately phoned the police and drove to the village. In an…

Imagine a student sitting in a locked classroom while an emergency unfolds just outside the door. In that critical moment, one of the fastest ways to reach help isn’t a school intercom or a district protocol. It’s the phone in their backpack. It’s 2026, and whether we like it or not, smartphones have become fundamental to how we communicate. They are often our quickest way to reach help when something goes wrong. We save the people closest to us directly in our contacts, and emergency services are a few taps away. Society has evolved around the immediate connection phones provide,…

I was seven years old, still in my school uniform, spewing out my thoughts to my mom. My vocabulary was limited, but my emotions certainly were not. Somewhere in the middle of my passionate rambling, my mom pulled out her phone and began to record me. The moment I noticed the camera, I held my head a little higher, proud that my concerns were being documented. To me, that camera meant that what I was saying mattered — that my frustration was being heard and that, somehow, my voice could reach beyond that singular moment. It was the day before…

We have all heard the phrase “diversity is a strength.” But what happens when a hate incident targets a community in a city where that very identity is deeply rooted? In Glendale, California, a recent incident suggests that the phrase is only as strong as the accountability behind it. Armenian identity has a longstanding presence in Glendale, dating back to the early 1900s. Today the city is home to one of the largest Armenian populations in the United States, with Armenian churches, schools, businesses, and cultural organizations woven into its everyday life. As an ethnic minority in the United States,…