Fresh out of the University of Chicago Law School, 25-year-old Oak Park native and OPRF alum Michelle Mbekeani-Wiley is leveraging the lessons learned from her successful campaign for OPRF’s student body presidency to her current campaign for a seat on the D200 Board of Education in the April election.
“I knew there would be some talk about me being too young and so forth,” Mbekeani-Wiley said.
“But if I have something of value to contribute, I shouldn’t wait on it,” she said. “You’re not too young to engage with your community and be civically involved. This is my way of getting involved and jumping in and advocating for people who deserve to be heard.”
Mbekeani-Wiley said that she’ll lean on her law education and her experience as a student advocate to bring a voice to the board that she says is currently somewhat muted—that of the student body.
“My goal is really to incorporate the student voice, which I think is missing. It would be good to have recent alums speak for students,” she said, citing a range of issues, such as the student achievement gap and alcohol abuse, on which recent alum might provide valuable insights during board discussions.
“I am all for listening to students’ issues, because they are the ones who deal with the consequences of the decision made [by the board],” she said. “Students deserve a seat at the table from someone who can advocate on their behalf.”
A member of Oak Park’s Community Relations Commission, Mbekeani-Wiley helped implement Peace Circles at the high school, wherein students candidly discussed some of the school’s most pressing issues, particularly the racial tension that seems a chronic, lingering aspect of OPRF’s culture.
“I have pages and pages of notes from so many different people,” she said. “I was in awe about how insightful people were with everything that is going on.”
Since graduating from OPRF in 2006, the newly wed has taken her passion for advocacy halfway across the world—from raising $20,000 in six months last year through Then Just Feed One, a nonprofit she founded while in college, in order to purchase ventilators for maternity wards in her family’s homeland of Malawi, to advocating for the rights of Turkish Germans before the Bundestag.
“There’s an achievement gap there between native Germans and Germans of Turkish descent,” she said. “If you fail German in that country, you’re basically out of the running to get into university, but they don’t develop programs for people who don’t speak German at home.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article inaccurately stated that Mbekeani-Wiley is a civil rights attorney, a title she never claimed. Wednesay Journal regrets this error.
