Why She Built Instead of Waited
She did not write a letter to a government agency. She did not wait for a nonprofit to respond. She did not ask an adult to fix it. She opened an IDE and started building.
"I looked for something that would help a family the moment a child went missing. I found a government PDF. Nothing that does anything. So I built it."
— ZaLayaa Jahzara, Creator, FIND ME ASAPShe is the child this system had no tools for. She did not just understand this problem — she has always lived inside it. FIND ME ASAP is the result: a complete emergency response platform built by a 13-year-old Black girl with 40+ invisible conditions, for every child the system left out.
ZaLayaa Jahzara watched girls who look like her go missing. She watched children with invisible disabilities be mishandled — not out of cruelty, but out of ignorance. An officer runs toward a child with autism and the child flees. A bystander grabs the arm of a child with EDS and dislocates her shoulder. A child goes nonverbal and is assumed to be lying.
When she searched for a tool to help a family in the first minutes of a child going missing, she found a government PDF from 2017. No interactivity. No personalization. Unchanged for nearly a decade, for a crisis that kills within hours.