🌍Nobody Clapped For Them. They Showed Up Anyway. A World Humanitarian Day reflection 🌍

A World Humanitarian Day reflection · #ActForHumanity

Yesterday was World Humanitarian Day.

I did not spend it at a conference. I did not receive an award or stand behind a podium. I spent part of it thinking about the women I know who will never be on a list of humanitarians and who are, without question, the most humanitarian people I have ever met.

This story is for them. And for all of us who are quietly doing the work the world has not yet learned to celebrate.

I want to tell you what humanitarian work actually looks like from where I stand.

It looks like a grandmother in Ogun State, Nigeria, who wakes before sunrise to sell small things at the roadside, because the teenage girl in her care needs school fees by Monday and there is no one else to pay them. Nobody calls her a humanitarian. She does not have a title or a foundation or a World Pulse profile. She has a granddaughter she has decided not to abandon, and that decision made again every single morning is one of the most profound acts of service I have ever witnessed.

It looks like Professor Charity Okujagu founder of O'Foundation and Hissoufac a woman I worked alongside in Nigeria who paid teachers from her own pocket every month, who funded young people's university education quietly and without fanfare, who built churches and ran her foundations since 2015 and never once waited for the world to tell her she was doing enough. She was doing it because she believed God had called her to serve. She passed away earlier this year. The world lost a humanitarian it barely knew it had.

It looks like @Jill Langhus, founder of Liluye, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering female human trafficking survivors, giving them wings to thrive through survivor-centred programmes and resources. Jill fights for the women society has most deeply failed, and then she shows up on World Pulse to hold the hands of women still finding their footing on the platform. She carries two callings at once the fight for survivors and the nurture of a global community and she carries both with grace.

It looks like @Nadra Almahdi, a Sudanese journalist and poet who puts her words where the need is greatest, documenting what is happening to women and girls with the precision of a reporter and the soul of a poet. Every line she writes is an act of resistance. Every story she tells refuses to let a life disappear into silence.

It looks like @Amina608, a Congolese woman who fled her country and sought asylum in Uganda. She could have spent every ounce of her energy simply surviving. Instead she turned around and faced the women still arriving behind her the ones still lost, still afraid, still finding their footing in a country that was not theirs either. She became their guide, their advocate, their sister. Not because anyone appointed her, she could not look away.

It looks like @Queen Sheba D. Cisse founder of Queen Sheba Village, a nonprofit built on the belief that real change starts from the ground up. She advocates for the social and economic welfare of young women, girls, youth, and orphans in African communities. Her vision is as bold as her name. To build a safe educational haven where empowerment and leadership are not taught as theories but lived as daily realities.

And it looks like @Jensine Larsen, award-winning digital entrepreneur, international journalist, and our amiable founder of World Pulse who looked at a world where women's voices were scattered, suppressed, and separated by geography, language, and circumstance, and thought: what if I built a place where all of them could meet? World Pulse is not just a platform. It is a humanitarian act in itself.

Every woman who has ever found her voice here, every story that has ever been told here, every connection that has ever been made here all of it exists because one woman decided that women's voices deserved a home.

The world has a particular image of a humanitarian.

Someone in a vest, perhaps, in a crisis zone. Someone with resources and a title and institutional backing. Someone who flies in to help and flies back out again.

I want to gently, firmly, lovingly challenge that image today because the humanitarians I know best do not all look the same.

Some are journalists. Some are refugees. Some are grandmothers. Some are survivors turned advocates. Some are founders who built platforms from a vision and a conviction. Some are women sitting behind a screen right now, on this platform, writing the truths of their communities into existence because someone has to.

They are everywhere, mostly invisible. And they are the reason communities and this global sisterhood survive.

That is the kind of humanitarian this world needs more of❤️

I couldn't mention all our names but we are remarkable❤️

So, on the morning after World Humanitarian Day and on every morning after that:

#ActForHumanity not with a title, not with a platform, not with permission.

Do not wait for the right conditions. The need around you is not waiting. The girl in your community who needs a mentor is not waiting. The woman who needs someone to say I see what you are carrying is not waiting.

You just have to show up. Consistently. Honestly. With whatever you have in your hands today.

That is humanitarianism in its purest form, not the kind that gets photographed, but the kind that changes lives.

To @Jill Langhus, @Nadra Almahdi, @Amina608, @Queen Sheba Cisse Jensine Larsen, and every unsung woman who has ever chosen service over comfort, community over convenience, someone else's need over her own rest we love you and celebrate you ❤️❤️

This day was always for YOU. FOR US. Even when we forgot to say so.

Keep going, sister. The work is real. The lives you are touching are real.

#ActForHumanity

With love from an Upcoming fellow servant❤️