Gaia CartabianoGaia Cartabiano served as Advocacy and Outreach Coordinator at the Levantine Cultural Center in 2011. As a young girl, her interest and curiosity blossomed at her first glimpse into the Middle Eastern world. Now at UCLA, she is currently majoring in Middle Eastern and North African studies with a minor in Arabic and Islamic Studies. While enjoying her advocacy work which promotes better understanding of a region that is often misunderstood by the west, she also hopes that the skills she learns while interning at the center will be successfully applied to her own creation, The Gaza Project. Working with children in Gaza, The Gaza Project strives to address the growing number of children with severe post traumatic stress disorder, and to provide a non-violent, positive and creative outlet for them to express themselves, their frustrations, grief, and anxieties of growing up in a war-torn, complicated, and often ignored region of the world. Much inspired by her mother's work and the work of the late Juliano Mer-Khamis, she has started art projects and educational workshops to stimulate kids' creativity and expand their minds, and most importantly to show them their potential.