Parveen Kaur Mundi was nine years old when the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin was targeted by a white supremacist gunman — the deadliest attack on Sikhs in the US in the nation’s history. The shooting unfolded in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, just an hour’s drive from Mundi’s home in Chicagoland.
Growing up in the Sikh tradition, Mundi watched folks speak out against injustices and learned the stories of ancestors who resisted oppression, but her community’s response to the Oak Creek shooting was pivotal in shaping her understanding of how to respond to hatred with connection, care, and mobilization.
It was also a motivating factor in her decision to pursue a degree in political science at DePaul University in Chicago, with focuses on international politics, religious nationalism, and organized hate as encountered by minorities in the Asian community.
Now a senior at DePaul, Mundi has spent the better part of the last decade pouring her time, talents, and passion into advocacy and leadership — from co-founding a successful youth-led 501c3, Dear Asian Youth (DAY), as a high schooler to being elected as a Sikh student body president at a Vincentian Catholic institution.
As a young leader, Mundi exemplifies the resilience of the “lockdown generation,” a term coined to name both the reality of gun violence as a commonplace and the impact of the pandemic on Gen Z’s formative years.
“In my tradition, it’s very common to speak out against injustices, and I don’t think I quite had an opportunity to do that in an academic setting through most of high school,” she shared, speaking of how the pandemic made difficult to find traditional spaces, like Model UN or debate, to make her voice heard until becoming involved in Dear Asian Youth.
DAY started in April of 2020 as a poetry blog in response to anti-Asian hate. It’s now a nonprofit with over 100 chapters and 110,000 social media followers.
Guided by Sikh principles, and with the intent to continue her advocacy work, Mundi chose to pursue her bachelor’s close to home, at DePaul, because of the opportunities it afforded her to build a focused degree and be a part of student-run organizations — like the Student Government Association — that were designed to support a diverse array of perspectives.
“I ended up in student government because I was like, wow, they are actually empowered to do something. They have this huge level of obligation to the student body,” she said, recounting her first year in the governing body, when she was elected as Senator for Intercultural Awareness. “I [wasn’t] sure what I had to offer yet, but I [could] share what I had. That’s a teaching in Sikhi, Vand Chakna … I [could] work alongside students to reimagine campus for the better.”
Mundi’s efforts in student government materialized in various ways during her tenure as a senator and, eventually, student body president during the 2023-24 school year. From advocating for minority-led students groups as a representative to the University’s Speech and Expression Advisory Committee, to promoting religious expression on college campuses at the U.S. Department of Education’s Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, to petitioning alongside her campus’ divestment coalition last spring, Mundi remained committed to leading with a focus on shared decision-making and genuine concern for the student, faculty, and staff voices she represented.
A strong advocate for interfaith work on her campus, Mundi also acknowledged that bridgebuilding has become more challenging in the past year, especially as her activism and leadership were met with criticism.
“There were definitely moments where I was the one dissenting voice on something, and it was really scary,” she said of committees and task forces where she, as president, was the only student in the room. “But I knew that I couldn’t look at the students that I represent and their needs and what I was hearing from them, and say I was too scared to say something when it really mattered.”
Returning to campus for the fall term presented significant challenges for Mundi as well, after a spring term that felt, according to her, “like a blur,” between facing assumptions made about her beliefs, being racialized as Muslim, and feeling unsafe and unwelcome on DePaul’s quad after authorities cleared the divestment coalition’s encampment.
In these trying moments, she relied on faculty and informal student-to-student connections she had built for solace and solidarity amid what Mundi described as a “marked difference in the livelihood on campus” after a contentious spring.
Even as Mundi spoke of the pain and frustration that lingers on campus, she acknowledged a concurrent hope, evidenced by student government’s preliminary efforts to expand DePaul’s Scholars at Risk Program, which would offer full tuition scholarships to students in Gaza.
Appointed in 2023 the National Chair of the Sikh American National Youth Council, Mundi also looks to intergenerational leaders at the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund who mentor her as a bridgebuilder and activist. “It’s nice to be in those intergenerational groups where it felt like I wouldn’t be organizing in a student capacity forever,” she said. “And I think it’s been nice to look towards the future.”
What’s next on the horizon for Mundi as she graduates this March is devoting more time to Dear Asian Youth, aspiring to build intersectional movements that take diverse identities into account, and, in the spirit of generational optimism and resilience which she draws from her Sikh tradition, asking critical questions essential to the pursuit of pluralism: “How do we build pluralism across civic society?” she asked. “Who are the stakeholders that need to get there? And what sort of intersectional campaigns need to form to kind of start addressing that?”
