Dear Alumni,

Happy holidays everyone!

Your Alumni Association’s new Executive Council will be taking over on January 1, 2018. I wanted to personally thank all of you for the support that my team and I have received over the last two years. It has been an honor to serve you all.

Our intent has always been to grow AKUAANA and provide value to our members. We have been met with many successes and some unfinished business. Our numbers have grown from about a 100 members to now over 200 active members and the traffic to our Facebook page and website is now in the thousands. Abdul Basit Saeed (2007), our Web and Social Media Manager, has been the rock around which the technical aspects of our web presence have been built and the organization will always be indebted to him.

Over the past two years our major focus was community building, and to achieve this we organized multiple regional meetings in 2016 and 2017. This has greatly enhanced our networking. Our alumni are now more informed about the work the Alumni Association has been doing. I would like to thank all the alumni who volunteered in hosting these regional reunions. We also hosted very successful annual reunions in Washington DC and Orlando FL.

We have been working with the leadership at AKUMC to help our alumni with issues that arise periodically. In fact, with the efforts of the Executive Council and our alumni, one of our fresh alumni was able to start residency on time this year rather than missing a year and potential residency spot.

AKUAANA also initiated its first project with AKU in August 2016. It is a project for the treatment of anemia in pregnancy by screening pregnant females and treating them with iron supplements and IV iron (Venofer). I would like to congratulate our Alumni who have raised around $70,000 dollars for this project. This would fund our project for a total of 4 years. A short video of the AKUAANA Outreach Clinic in Ibrahim Hyderi, and the most recent Impact Report of the project are available on the website.

This year we also partnered with APPNA for their National Food Pantry Project. We raised over $4,000 and APPNA matched it with $2,000. AKUAANA members spent a day volunteering at the Maryland Food Bank and also gave the check to the pantry.

The devastation in Houston with Hurricane Harvey affected a number of our Alumni as we have a significant concentration of Alumni in the area. We developed an emergency committee who reached out to alumni in Houston and offered them help. A number of Alumni in Houston in safe areas opened their home to accommodate other Alumni. We raised $10,000 for the Mayor of Houston Hurricane Harvey Fund also. This is a true testament to our AKUAANA community and I would like to congratulate everyone who worked and volunteered their time.

We enter a new phase in the coming years. The need for increased involvement of the younger classes, continued membership drives and defining our mission are the critical components of success. There are a number of new initiatives that are in the works.

I wish President-Elect Namirah Jamshed (1996) and her team the best of success, and thank you all again.

Best regards
Habib Chotani (1995)
AKUAANA President, 2016-2017

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)

January 1^st, 2016

Thank you for nominating us as the leaders of your Alumni Association for the next two years. We would also like to thank our predecessors who have guided this association and made great strides in organizing AKUAANA.

There are roughly 2000 AKUMC graduates in North America and they represent the fastest growing segment of all medical graduates from Pakistan. Those of you who follow our website and our Facebook page already know how successful our graduates have been in their adopted homelands. We have some of the youngest professors, most successful academicians and brightest entrepreneurs in the country!

The last Executive Council of AKUAANA has made impressive progress; the membership has grown significantly, our tax-exempt status has been reinstated to 501(c)(7) status allowing our holdings to be tax-free, the Association’s constitution has been strengthened and a Board of Trustees has been elected. Over the next couple of years, the new Executive Council will continue working towards the goals set forth by our predecessors. We will continue working on improving our membership, work towards give a clear meaning for our Alumni body, and work towards getting more organized in the US. The new Executive Council have a bunch of new ideas to move our organization to the next level. We will be approaching our membership to share our ideas and also will seek new ideas.

To do so, we have to engage our alumni and give them a platform to bring forth their ideas and then 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)