Heela Yoon is the Founder of Afghan Youth Ambassadors for Peace Organization (AYAPO), a grassroots NGO working in the Eastern provinces of Afghanistan focusing on UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security and Resolution 2250 on Youth, Peace and Security, as well as local peacebuilding.
Through AYAPO, Heela has trained nearly 100 young girls in Nangarhar, Laghman, and Kabul on gender equality, leadership, and how to act as first responders to humanitarian crises. With her NGO, she has engaged with religious and tribal leaders through community peacebuilding dialogues in the Eastern zone to advocate for Afghan girls’ education.
Heela has more than five years of experience working with humanitarian and human rights organizations. She has worked with the Global Network of Women Peacebuilders (GNWP) as a Cora Weiss peacebuilding fellow focusing on localizing the Women, Peace, and Security agenda in Myanmar, Bangladesh, and the Philippines. Before joining GNWP, she worked with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Afghanistan as a program coordinator for UNFPA.
In 2020, she was the Civil Society briefer for the 64th Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations, and she was recognized as one of the young emerging peacemakers from Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice.
Currently, Heela is a Research Consultant with Amnesty International focusing on the human rights situation in Afghanistan and works as a trainee with Oxfam Great Britain as well as an Afghan Coordinator for the International Parliamentary Network for Education.