Honoring the Legacy of Our Three Winners

Dr. Suzanne Barakat is a practicing physician, humanitarian, and prominent advocate for inclusion and social justice. She earned her undergraduate and medical degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before completing her residency in Family and Community Medicine at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). Dr. Barakat has worked extensively with refugees and has contributed to research on the mental health of Arabic-speaking communities worldwide. Her clinical practice spans hospital medicine, labor and delivery, and urgent care, focusing predominantly on underserved communities.

In 2015, Dr. Barakat gained international recognition following the tragic murders of her brother, his wife, and her sister in an Islamophobic hate crime in North Carolina. She now serves as board chair of Our Three Winners Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to combating Islamophobia and promoting social justice. Her advocacy extends to high-level policy influence, where she has engaged with top U.S. officials and contributed to the White House Strategy to Counter Islamophobia and Anti-Arab Hate.

The violent loss of her family members to hate and persecution, in the U.S. and abroad, has uniquely positioned Dr. Barakat to combine medical training with advocacy work, establishing her as a national leader in refugee health and asylum medicine. As the executive director of the UCSF Health and Human Rights Initiative, she spearheaded efforts to standardize clinical training and documentation of human rights violations and developed the world’s first clinical fellowship in asylum medicine.

A respected lecturer who frequently speaks on refugee and asylee health, human rights, and countering Islamophobia and hate crimes, Dr. Barakat has participated in roundtable discussions with global leaders, appeared on major news outlets, been featured in documentaries, and delivered a TED Talk. President Biden honored her with the Uniter award.

Justine Hollingshead has over thirty five years of success working as an administrator in higher education on various college campuses across the country, in addition to the business sector as well. She offers particular expertise in emergency preparedness and crisis response, event planning, training, leadership, and administration. Justine earned her Bachelor’s degree from Slippery Rock University in Communication, her Master’s degree in Counseling and Student Personnel Administration from the University of Maryland, College Park and has completed a ten-week comprehensive business training program with the Council for Entrepreneurial Development in North Carolina.

In her current role at NC State University, she serves as an Assistant Vice Chancellor in the Division of Academic and Student Affairs leading a newly created unit in the Office of Student Life and Advocacy.

Justine has been a part of an implementation team at NC State to operationalize collective efforts in addressing planning, logistics, and response to crisis situations. She was deployed to UNC Wilmington for a month to assist with their campus recovery efforts following Hurricane Florence and recently assisted with response at UNC-Asheville following Hurricane Helene. During the university’s COVID pandemic response, she served as a key leader on the response team. Justine is an AUVSI TOP Level III certified Small Unmanned Aircraft System (drone) pilot with the Federal Aviation Administration and the state of North Carolina. She has been flying various drones for over six years. Ms. Hollingshead is also a certified Emergency Medical Technician in the state of North Carolina and has done medical service work in Haiti, was deployed to Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina, and to eastern NC after Hurricane Floyd. Justine was a volunteer with a local EMS agency for 25 years and served as a field supervisor for the Rex Hospital Emergency Response Team. Ms. Hollingshead is also a member of local and national non-profit boards.

Ismael Benhamida is Vice President at Marcus & Millichap where he specializes in Bay Area apartment and commercial real estate investments. He helps real estate investors create plans to optimize their real estate portfolios and executes on those plans to achieve their goals.

Prior to joining Marcus & Millichap, Ismael was on eBay’s business management team where he designed and managed trust policies and risk management systems on a global basis. He has an MBA from The Wharton School and chemical engineering and materials science degrees from U.C. Berkeley. Ismael is passionate about economic, political, and social justice issues; and enjoys travelling, spending time with his family, bicycling, and skateboarding.

Manar is a civil rights attorney and strategist of 20 years with expertise in technology and social media, free speech, immigration, national security, gender equity, and hate crimes. As an independent consultant, she supports various nonprofits organizations and philanthropic institutions on strategy development, policy analysis, campaign and program design, grantmaking, and research.

In her previous role, Manar served as Associate General Counsel on the Civil Rights Team at Meta, where she conducted company-wide civil rights reviews with a focus on enhancing protections for marginalized communities and ensuring that the company was moving towards equity on all its platforms. This work included policy, governance, and product analysis, including on the metaverse and AI. Manar launched the company’s inaugural civil rights training which has since been taken by over 50,000 employees and authored the company’s Progress Report on the Civil Right Audit. Prior to joining Meta, Manar was a Senior Legislative and Advocacy Counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) where she worked at the intersection of issues impacting Arab, Black, Iranian, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian communities, including immigration, national security and counterterrorism, white supremacist violence, and hate crimes and bullying. During the Obama Administration, she served as the Deputy Policy Director for Immigration in the White House Domestic Policy Council where she assisted with the development of the President’s strategy for building a 21st century immigration system. She previously served as Policy Director at South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) and she provided assistance to domestic violence survivors through civil and criminal systems at Legal Services of New York City and the National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women respectively.

Manar received her J.D. from Brooklyn Law School and her B.A. from Wellesley College.

Arif Khan serves on the board of Our Three Winners Foundation. After graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill, Arif spent his career in management consulting in the healthcare space and eventually helped start a consulting firm in Washington, D.C. in 2009. He currently serves as Vice President of the Total Care and Cost Improvement (TCCI) Program at CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield in Maryland.

His expertise has been leading large-scale pharmacy procurements and implementations for health plans and overseeing all aspects of the care continuum, including behavioral health, home-based and post-acute care, and other clinical programs. In addition, Arif serves as Board Secretary for Baltimore Medical System, a Federally Qualified Health Center based in Baltimore, Maryland.