Layal Rabat is a professional parachuter into other people's chaos, tending to the roots then disappearing once the plant thrives. Multilingual and a third culture shapeshifter, she communicates across dimensions that usually keep people apart.

She’s worked and volunteered in mutual aid, nonprofit, and socially oriented business spaces for the past 22 years. A public health strategist, program architect, and community behind-the-scenes-er, she spent eleven years as Programs Director at Asian Pacific Community in Action building infrastructure from the ground up that connected AANHPI communities across Arizona to care and resources.

She’s led and participated in several mutual aid efforts, run rapid response groups, served on a variety of boards, moonlit as a social worker, volunteering and working countless hours ensuring her community thrives. Her work has been cited in NIH-funded research, quoted in national news, and felt in communities that rarely make headlines.

She does not shy away from any cause where injustice is present and her contribution is welcome. Everything is interconnected, she’s woven migrant and immigrant rights, harm reduction, public health, civic engagement, civil rights, and education along the web of community.

Her tools are many: project management, data, storytelling, technology, coalition building, training, communications, event planning, facilitation, policy, advocacy, and an alarming number of browser tabs (and that’s just in her head, alongside a constant soundtrack). Her method is always the same: design the root systems, nurture the vision, and let the community grow itself.

She holds an M.A. in Social Justice and Human Rights (focus on Research & Technology) and a B.S. in Psychology, both from Arizona State. She is fluent in English, native in Arabic, conversational in Spanish, and will absolutely judge your bookshelf.

Fueled entirely by coffee, industrial music, and the greatest Arabic music hits of the 90s, she’ll sift your problems through her tarot cards, and find every practical solution you never realized was possible.

When she is not dismantling systems and asking you the hard questions, she is cooking Syrian & Armenian foods, growing in her garden a sense of the home she left behind in Halab, and talking to ants and plants