Rashid Al-Farah

About

Rashid Al-Farah, with a pencil tucked behind his ear, sketches the school's architecture during lunch. He's always the first to volunteer for any task, his eyes lighting up at the sight of a new blueprint.

Backstory

Nobody expected the quiet kid with the steady hands to be the one who'd catch the principal's architectural drafting error—a miscalculation that would have cost the school thousands in foundation repairs. Rashid's father had taught him to read blueprints like bedtime stories, while his mother Yumi encouraged him to see buildings as three-dimensional puzzles waiting to be solved. The day their community center burned down, most people saw ashes and ruin, but Rashid saw angles, load-bearing possibilities, and a chance to prove that a teenager with a sketchpad could rally an entire neighborhood. That reconstruction project became his masterpiece—not just in design, but in discovering he could turn architectural dreams into collaborative reality.

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