Sharq.Org has partnered with Firma Alexandra Sandels and the Swedish Institute, once again, to inaugurate and nurture a collective of changemakers across the Arab region. The objective of this initiative is to enhance the participation of women and youths in peacebuilding and politics and enhance effectiveness in this regard through transnational collaboration.
The collective will, in its initial phase (2022-23), be made up of ten female leaders and twenty youths in five countries: Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, and Yemen
Working together, this collective will:
- include people from a multitude of ethnicities and religions present in the Arab region,
- enhance leadership skills among youths,
- strengthen cross-border collaboration and knowledge exchanges,
- enhance confidence and skills relevant to sociopolitical participation and development,
- address and mitigate unconscious biases that promote othering.
The changemakers will:
- meet regularly between April 2022 and summer 2023
- define the scope of the collective and its objectives and activities
- attend workshops and seminars aimed at enhancing skills and knowledge
- collectively mentor twenty youths across the region
- work together and with the youth tier to produce content in a multitude of languages spoken in the Arab region. The content will address a specific socio-political topic, to be determined by the collective, will be multi-disciplinary in nature (articles, interviews, poetry, art, photography, graphics, podcast, video, etc.) and will be disseminated for use by activists, researchers and journalists who support the mission and vision of the collective.
Sharq.Org will organize and host weekly one-hour meetings between April 2022 and summer 2023 to facilitate the development of the collective’s leadership and youth tiers. The meetings will be held online on a weekday evening to enable attendance.
Meetings will take on different forms: informal brainstorming sessions, skills workshops, presentations by members and guest speakers, content development workshops. Each member of the leadership tier will be expected to attend at least 60% of the meetings, which equates to approximately 30 one-hour sessions over the course of a year. Those who attend the required number of sessions will be modestly compensated to cover costs associated with attendance, such as internet and childcare.
