10/10/2025
Look at this guy! It's your new President of the US Afghan Chamber of Commerce, Mister Haroon Safi!
Haroon does not sleep a lot. He's been working directly with evacuated Afghan service personnel since they arrived in St. Louis four years ago. He had arrived with a Special Immigrant Visa for assisting US forces in Afghanistan only 7 years earlier and was working a full-time job, but would spend the rest of his waking hours volunteering in the hotels, working with a cobbled-together coalition of assisters, interpreting, troubleshooting, and connecting.
He's still doing all of that, now at the head of a team of Afghan case managers under a federal program at Monarch, and he hasn't slowed down. He's still out here connecting community members with resources, managing crises, creating opportunities, squashing beef, and being "the guy" for many service providers (not just us!). He's even started taking the "Uncle Haroon" show on the road, working with evacuees in Columbia, Springfield, and Kansas City. And he'll now lead the Afghan Chamber, voted in by his peers, to work on building out economic opportunity for the larger community. And he's going to do it all with a smile and an alarming lack of sleep. Guy's truly a gem. He deserves this honor and any/all others that should come his way.
