AKUAANA President’s Message to Alumni: January 2017

It has been another great year for AKUAANA, the Aga Khan University Alumni Association of North America. Our website, AKUAANA.org and Facebook page have both become excellent resources for our alumni members. We have some of the youngest professors, most successful academicians and brightest entrepreneurs in the country! We have featured many prominent alumni on our website/Facebook page and this has been a runaway success.

Our membership continues to flourish and Lifetime Membership has increased significantly. The number of recent graduates who are now actively participating in AKUAANA has grown, which is a great success as we have been able to engage our fresh graduates. There are currently over 1900 AKU graduates in North America and our goal is to bring as many of these graduates into the AKUAANA family and harness their incredible potential. We continue to grow and mold our association to tackle the most pressing issues of our times.

Last year we had a great meeting in Washington DC. Our medical college Dean, Dr Farhat Abbas and our beloved professor Dr Zulfikar Bhutta were in presence. The official signing of class gifts to AKU by the Class of ‘89 ($250,000) and Class of ‘90 ($500,000) took place. We were actively involved in various activities at APPNA including the CME and young physician coaching. This year for the first time in the 39-year history of APPNA, an AKUAANA Lifetime Member ran and won the election for Secretary APPNA. Rizwan Khalid, Class of ’99, will be the APPNA Secretary for the year 2017. This is a great achievement from our alumni body.

For community building and networking, regional reunions were held at 6 locations throughout the US (Minnesota, Dallas, DC/Maryland/Virginia, St Louis, Atlanta and New Jersey) and this has been directly tied to the incredible efforts of the local alumni.

We now have a functioning Board of Advisors. Their roles are defined by our Constitution and Bylaws Committee and have been approved by the General Body.

We also have started a charity project with AKU, Karachi, Pakistan. In the past, many individual projects have been done with AKU and outside AKU (like TCF) by various graduating classes. The AKUAANA Outreach Clinic Initiative at Ibrahim Hyderi, Karachi, Pakistan, is the first AKUAANA project that has been adapted by various graduating classes. This project will focus on treatment of anemia in pregnant females in the area. We have already collected approximately $70,000 for this initiative to date and the outreach clinic is fully functional since August, 2016.

As we look to the future, our hope is to leverage our individual successes and use AKUAANA as a platform to launch larger philanthropic endeavors. We will continue organizing regional reunions throughout the US and help grow the organization. We also hope to collaborate further with AKU and APPNA on its various platforms.

To do so, we will continue to engage our alumni and give them a platform to bring forth their ideas and eventually a mechanism to give these ideas life. Clearly, none of these goals can be accomplished without active alumni involvement. This participation has to begin with becoming an AKUAANA member and then active participation in all the decisions that we have to make over the next 25 years. We start the membership drive this month, so please join us, encourage others and get excited about the possibilities!

We thank you again for this opportunity to serve the organization and hope that we can live up to your expectations. If you have any questions, comments or thoughts, please reach out to any member of the team.

Best wishes,

Habib Chotani, 1995
President, AKUAANA (2016-17)