Yasmin Afshar is an urban planner and writer with a passion for creating connected communities through design, process, and storytelling. Her planning work explores the interplay between public policy, community design and engagement through storytelling on projects across North America. Her areas of focus include equitable revitalization and community-centered processes, and she has written and spoken about loneliness in city-building for a couple of years now. She was recently accepted into a Masters of Fine Arts program with the University of King’s College and Dalhousie to further explore the topic of loneliness through her writing.