The Taleem Project  
‍^{Telling Stories That Matter}

Baktash is the founder of the Taleem Project which is dedicated to storytelling, conflict resolution, and engaging others with a sense of openness and radical curiosity. This project is about humanizing those deemed as “the other”. In a world of conflict and war, people flee their homelands far and away by necessity and arrive in our towns, communities, and neighborhoods. The Taleem Project is about bringing once perceived distant worlds together to find common ground and understanding through storytelling and facilitating conversations about identity, race, and finding a sense of home and belonging. What is required of us in these moments is courage, and most of all, imagination – imagination of a world we do not yet know.

 The conference and reunion of the Friends of Afghanistan (FoA), commemorating the 1962 establishment of the Peace Corps in Afghanistan, was held in Cherry Creek from September19th to September 22nd, 2023, and dedicated in memory of RPCV Teri Sullivan Lutz. Teri proposed the Greater Denver area as the site for our celebration of service, and she was the first chairperson of FOA, Denver Conference Committee. Teri was part of the Peace Corps inaugural Teacher Corps/Peace Corps group in the early 1970s to help modernize the Afghan Education System.

Donations to the Teri Sullivan Lutz Memorial Fund will go to SOLA, an educational clearinghouse for Afghan girls in the diaspora. SOLA is Friends of Afghanistan's oldest partner organization. It enables Afghan girls worldwide to graduate with a world-class education in a protected boarding school environment. Teri was a lifelong advocate for equitable educational opportunities for women and girls, which grew out of her first role as an educator in pre-Taliban Afghanistan, teaching girls in Jalalabad, Afghanistan.