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About
Bridges and Barriers is a podcast and a space which is dedicated to bringing together individuals from various backgrounds to discuss their respective fields, and how we can tackle the world's biggest challenges. It's an opportunity to discuss personal perspectives into world issues, and create a candid conversation around the work we all do.
Meet The Hosts
Maryam and Nivaal
Rehman
Aamyneh Mecklai
Maryam and Nivaal Rehman are award-winning twin activists, journalists and filmmakers. Over the course of their career, they have conducted interviews with many people all over the world, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Malala Yousafzai, Madame Christine Lagarde, Kathy Calvin, Bertrand Piccard, and more. They have created documentaries and films with the World With MNR, as well as global storytelling companies like The Walt Disney Company. In this new podcast, they hope to interview inspirational people from around the world, and support their passion for transforming journalism to be more positive, actionable, and accessible for everyone.
An aspiring lawyer and social entrepreneur, Aamyneh Mecklai is second-year Lester B. Pearson Scholar at the University of Toronto where she studies economics, finance, and data science. In 2018, she founded Speak to Lead through which she teaches conversational English, global awareness, and public speaking skills to students from low-income families enrolled at government-run schools to help students think critically, globally, and inquisitively. Speak to Lead birthed an extraordinary family of 800+ students united by their determined pursuit of knowledge: a desire to speak in order to lead. Aamyneh is currently researching how the implementation of the RTE Act, 2009 is correlated with student engagement particularly among groups of students from underrepresented communities and she hopes to use her diverse experiences in education policy to bridge the gap between education research and advocacy. Outside of the classroom, she dances, plays the piano, and dabbles in poetry.