Noshaq had first been successfully summitted by a team of Afghan men just 9 years earlier.Īscend was born in large part from LeGree’s own love of athletics and the outdoors. In 2018, Hanifa Yousoufi, an alumna of the program, became the first Afghan woman to climb the country’s highest peak, Noshaq, which rises 24,580 feet above the Wakhan Corridor in the Hindu Kush mountain range. Just three years ago, Ascend had reached a literal high point. “I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that the Taliban are in charge and girls can’t go to school and all the things we worried about are happening.” My head is still spinning,” says LeGree, who currently lives in Naples, Italy, with her husband, a U.S. Just during the course of her interview with HKS Magazine, she was interrupted by a text from Kennedy School classmate and Chilean Ambassador to Ireland Carla Serazzi MPA 2014, who is helping resettle 10 Ascend families in Santiago. She successfully relocated the vast majority (a handful elected to stay) of the 133 members of the Ascend community. Speaking in late October, LeGree said the dust was settling from 12 grueling weeks of nonstop phone calls, emails, texts, networking, and basically begging. I never wanted to be a pipeline for people to leave.” Working to relocate them, she says, “has been the dead opposite of everything I’ve ever stood for in Afghanistan: strengthen communities create change. “It was very apparent very quickly that they did in fact need to flee,” LeGree says about the participants, alumni, and staff of Ascend Athletics, the NGO she founded, which uses mountaineering and athletics to empower young women with self-confidence and leadership skills. MARINA LEGREE MC/MPA 2014 WILL NEVER FORGET the week in mid-August when the Taliban swept back into control of Afghanistan and her job suddenly changed from lifting young Afghan women up to getting them airlifted out. Taubman Center for State and Local Government.Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government.Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy.Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation.
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