Alumnus Seth Holm helps launch Afghan Education Student Outreach Project
Dr. Seth Holm (PhD 2012) is currently teaching Latin and Ancient Greek (as well as advising the Model UN club) at the Hun School of Princeton, a college preparatory school in NJ.
As of June 2022, Seth and Zahra, one of his students, decided to launch an English class for young women and girls in Afghanistan. Since launching the program, the group has grown from 20 to45 students ranging from 13-32 years of age. The course even includes phone buddies, which allows the students to practice every week with a friendly volunteer.
Two women from the program have now accepted full scholarships and are now studying at the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh.
The program has since evolved and is now known as the Afghan Education Student Outreach Project (AESOP aesopafghanistan.org). This program pairs a fluent English speaker/advanced Afghan students with younger Afghans (ages 12 to 18) to guide them through their elementary/intermediate English learning.
Because of this amazing work, the program has been adopted by the Afghan Girls Financial Assistance Fund (agfaf.org), who is working to help place some of these students in schools abroad.
Together, AGFAF scholars and AESOP students (both in the U.S. and in Afghanistan) are creating an elementary and advanced TOEFL-prep course. Combined with Seth’s course and the mentoring program, these courses will help preserve the well-spring of educated Afghan women (despite the Taliban’s current ban on education) who can pursue study abroad.
And to top this all off, Seth’s school, The Hun School of Princeton, has agreed to extend 2 continuing scholarships for Afghan girls from the course! This will truly be a life-changing experience for many Afghan women both now and in the future.
If you would like to learn more about Seth’s class, they were recently featured on CBS here. If you like to support this work, please visit agfaf.org to learn more about the fund and how to help or visit their GoFundMe to directly support AESOP. We congratulate Seth on his excellent and important work!