Sobia Afridi started with Oxford City Council in 2022 as an Equality and Diversity Inclusion Specialist, where her role is to improve diversity at the Council by setting up new networks, whilst simultaneously increasing engage with the existing networks. Sobia set up a ‘lunch and learn’ initiative, where one of the sessions focused on Islamophobia Awareness month. A further part of her role is looking at how the process of data collection and analysis can be improved, which will be collated into an Inclusive Recruitment Guide, to be written by Sobia. Prior to Oxford City Council, she had been working in the education sector for 26 years. Her role at Oxford Brookes University centred around supporting under-represented groups to access higher education – projects have included mentoring for young people at the Oxford Central Mosque, to improve attainment in maths and English. Sobia is passionate about tackling issues that some South Asian families consider ‘taboo’ subjects, which include forced marriage, first-cousin marriage, fertility, disability and adoption. She devotes a substantial amount of personal time to serving her local community, where she helps run a liberal Islam weekend club for young people in Oxford.
