Azadeh “Azi” Ghafari is a mental health practitioner, educator, and hospital administrator in Southern California. She specializes in public health policy and mental health advocacy within immigrant and refugee populations.

Azadeh is an Iranian-American immigrant born in Tehran, Iran. Her family obtained refugee status and was granted asylum in the United States in 1992. She is co-Director of the Afghan Women’s Mission and has served in various capacities, including as Development and Outreach Director, since 2001. During the 2008 and 2012 general elections, she worked as an Organizing Director for the Obama for America campaign. During the 2018 midterm elections which flipped the US House, she worked as the Compliance Finance Director for the California Democratic Party (CDP) and went on to serve as the party’s first female Creative Director.

As a decaf-averse life-form and future Fox News target, she enjoys regulating her nervous system by gardening, swimming, pressing flowers, channeling her inner Emily Dickinson, and pioneering innovative salads while listening to Townes Van Zandt records.

Azi enjoys covering elections,  wellness grifters, extremist movements, neuroscience, public health policy, and tax code dilemmas. She loves dogs and working on social justice issues for good people. She thinks that 90% of problems can be solved by marketing (Unrelated. She didn’t learn that from dogs). And that solving the other 10% just requires good instincts and inspired digression. She likes to think of her social media presence as an elaborate performance art piece. She digs kind and clever people.