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In February 2022, Russia officially launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, escalating a yearslong conflict between the two nations. Macire Aribot Ashford, a Columbia University graduate student at the time, says it was all anyone on campus could talk about. “The whole school was all about Ukraine,” Aribot recalls. “We were [all] feeling very devastated.”
In what feels like an era of endless crises everywhere from Ukraine to Gaza to Sudan, that sense of devastation can be pervasive and overwhelming. I started grad school in the same cohort as Aribot, and I, too, remember the intensity of that time — the protests, the blue and yellow flags in dorm windows, the proliferation of expert panels and roundtable talks, and the adjusted syllabi to include coverage of the humanitarian crisis unfolding before our eyes.
It was also midterm season, with spring break around the corner. That semester, I had exactly one class with Aribot, Storytelling for Social Change. When we returned from break, it was hard to ignore her absence from our Thursday night seminar, as she was the only other Black girl in the class. It was almost a month before I discovered where Aribot had gone. While I and many of our classmates enjoyed a weeklong break from classes, Aribot was traveling across Europe, helping stranded international Black students studying in Ukraine evacuate from the war-torn country.
“I saw that there were students, Black students from the [African] continent, from the Caribbean, who were in Ukraine studying to get their degrees, and facing racism while trying to flee the war,” Aribot tells Teen Vogue. “I felt very connected to that because I'm a student myself.”
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Aribot continues, “[You’re] in class and you're hearing [support for Ukraine], but then you get on social media and you see that people who look like me, Black people, were facing racism and discrimination when trying to flee in the middle of a war. You start to question, How can something like this be? How can systemic racism be so pervasive that in the middle of war, people can choose to say that 'Your life doesn't matter, your life is less valuable than mine, because I am white and you are not'?"
Working to help these students wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision for Aribot, but a continuation of the now 26-year-old’s dedication to social justice for people of African descent across the diaspora. Back in 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd protests, Aribot and Nassim Ashford (who she married in 2024) started NoirUnited International with a group of friends. A US-based nonprofit, NoirUnited was founded to identify ways to address racial injustice and other social, economic, and political challenges faced by individuals of African descent and members of other marginalized communities around the world.
After graduating undergrad in 2019, Aribot began working for an international organization. Around that time, she noticed that although she was working on African issues, when she “looked around the room,” she was the only Black person.
“It made me think to myself, Well, within the international development sector, why aren't we prioritizing [hiring] Black people who can actually understand and relate to the challenges that we're trying to solve?” she explains. “That, alongside the George Floyd protests and the global movement that was happening, is what really inspired the start of NoirUnited — really trying to find a place for Black people, for marginalized people, to come together under an organization and start creating solutions, community-based and community-led solutions.”
NoirUnited’s first major project involved supporting five Black-owned businesses in Atlanta, particularly those that were affected by the double whammy of the COVID pandemic and the aftermath of the George Floyd protests. “That was our first initiative to show that we had a commitment to economic empowerment for Black people,” says Aribot. “As we're advocating for social justice, [we’re] also looking at the importance of economic justice.”
Aribot recalls further, “It felt really good to be a young person who had just graduated from school, to get together with my friends and organize something good for our community. I think we raised about $6,000, and at the time it felt like so much money!”
Two years later, as footage from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine flooded social media, it was hard for Aribot to ignore the accounts of Black people being discriminated against and denied access to trains and other means of evacuation. These accounts spurred her into action.
“The whole thing started very organically, with me reaching out to people on social media,” says Aribot, explaining that NoirUnited used GoFundMe to raise money to cover students’ transportation costs to evacuate Ukraine.
Aribot and NoirUnited cofounder Nassim continued to support students remotely, particularly a group stranded in Kherson, Ukraine. They worked with Russian and Ukrainian translators to connect with the local community and coordinate evacuations for students via buses, trains, and in some cases, flights. In addition to offering support for transportation costs, they also used the funds raised to help provide students still in Ukraine with basic necessities like food, water, and clothing. When spring break came around, Aribot and Nassim, who had already planned to spend the weeklong break in Europe anyway, decided to use the time to offer on-the-ground support to the students they had been supporting remotely.
“Once [the students] finally left Ukraine, they traveled for four days, and we met them at a train station in France,” says Aribot. It was a moment she can only describe as “surreal”: They had finally come face-to-face with the students they had been working with and advocating for in the previous weeks.
Aribot and Ashford then traveled to Krakow, Poland, where they continued their humanitarian efforts, this time with around 40 to 50 African students who had been sheltering in a monastery. They were able to help these students access basic necessities that they’d been living without.
“In Poland, we got a chance to speak with everyone, and we used that opportunity to confirm the alleged stories [of racism] that we heard, and every story was the same,” Aribot recalls. “It was just so shocking and really sad to hear, because we were there to help empower people… to help them recognize that, even though they've gone through this experience, they still are human beings that deserve justice, the right to education, and to live a life that doesn’t invite racism.”
This initial three-week stint in Europe affirmed Aribot’s commitment to advocacy for Black students in Ukraine. Upon her return to the states, NoirUnited received funding from Open Society Foundations, a US-based grant-making philanthropic organization, as well as Mercy Corps, a global humanitarian NGO, which allowed NoirUnited to scale up its relief efforts to meet the needs of even more students.
The following summer, Aribot would spend another two months in Europe, continuing to provide humanitarian aid, which ranged from basic necessities like food and direct cash assistance to technology assistance.
NoirUnited also organized several community advocacy workshops across France, Germany, and Poland, where they brought together now-evacuated students from Ukraine to talk about their experiences and brainstorm about solutions. Recognizing the trauma experienced by the students, they also worked with mental health professionals to provide psychosocial support, including nontraditional forms like art therapy.
In 2022 and 2023, Aribot Ashford ultimately traveled to and from Europe about eight or nine times, supporting more than 1,000 students. Throughout 2024, NoirUnited continued to build community with the students, who have since relocated to various parts of the world, by holding monthly virtual meetings.
“Now we're really focused on bringing them together through these community meetings to help them to build and chart their next steps,” says Aribot. “[It’s about] how do we continue to create space for them to connect and build on their shared experiences and see how Ukraine isn't the end of their journey and their story together.”
This past June, the organization also partnered with the Africa-America Institute (AAI)’s African STEM Initiative, a scholarship program designed to support African students pursuing STEM education at US universities. For the initiative’s inaugural cohort, NoirUnited helped AAI identify African students whose studies had been interrupted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine who are now studying at various universities in the US, ultimately securing nine scholarships for these students.
This kind of community building, Aribot believes, is key to navigating today’s tumultuous political climate, particularly when it comes to activism. “Even though we have powerful forces that are working actively against us,” she tells Teen Vogue, “the thing that we have to our advantage is the fact that we have access to knowledge and resources that we can leverage throughout our communities.”
She continues, “Activism is a very age-old kind of action to take. This isn't the first time [we’ve] had to fight against white supremacy. This isn't the first time Black and Brown communities have had to fight against systems of colonialism, systems of slavery — systems that should not have been in existence. [We] can learn from the activists of the past.”
Says Aribot, “The current administration wants us to go backwards. But just because they want America to go backwards doesn't mean that we actually have to go back.”
