About one year ago, I was having a conversation with Freddy Rading and Hamza Bilbeisi about how we could impact the lives of Middle Eastern students using our resources at Babson College. We all knew we wanted to make an impact but struggled to agree on how we could use entrepreneurship to do just that.

Here I am a year later, extremely grateful and excited to say we have successfully completed our pilot Al-Tareeq entrepreneurship program teaching Syrian refugees- with the help of Rami Rustom and Sari Samakie at Fikra 3al Mashi. Together for nine days we travelled to the International Medical Corps education center in Zarqa, Jordan to teach our students how they could apply their passions to business ventures and how they could be a support group for each other in times of turmoil. Our students identified problems in their communities, worked in teams to develop business plans, and presented final projects to us at the end of the course. We even partially funded the best two ideas (albeit a small amount) and will keep tabs to see how these ventures turn out. It has been such an incredible experience, and we hope this is only the start for Al-Tareeq.

              Today marked the end of our first program and while we leave feeling proud of what we’ve done, we are also sad to say bye to our class of 2016. There were definitely both ups and downs, and at times I realized just how hard it is to be a teacher. But at the same time, this experience was rewarding and it motivated us to start preparing in advance for next year.

We’re registering as a social enterprise so we will be able to operate as a regular business and offer our programs to private schools across the Middle East, so that we can be a sustainable business. We will also keep working with refugees by continuing our partnership with Fikra 3al Mashi and using the revenue from aforementioned projects to fund projects for refugees, ensuring that they never have to pay for our services. While our high school programs will cover entrepreneurship and business skills, all refugee projects will cover researching skills before introducing basic entrepreneurship concepts.

              As a result of our first program running successfully, we’ve already made contact with three private schools in Amman, Jordan that are interested in our services for next summer. Our next steps are to register as a legal entity, draft out our full business plan, and begin to raise seed funding. We also hope to have our own location for next summer, as we think we would benefit greatly from having our own space in which to hold lessons.  We want to thank everybody who has helped us get to this point so far because what has helped us grow so much has been the feedback we’ve received from all of our peers. 

The beginning of Ramadan brought with it a few road bumps. At the start of Lesson Six, students were the most unengaged that they had been throughout the entire course as many of them complained about a lack of sleep due to waking up early for the iftar. Moreover, a few of our students didn’t even show up. Though we did not anticipate what was ahead of us, we were able to revitalize students by starting off with some activities that got them moving around the classroom. We moved the chairs and the desks and sat ourselves and the students on the floor in a circle in hope of bolstering a more balanced conversation. Lesson Six was a conceptual lesson, and we wanted Lesson Seven to be more of an active learning experience.

We began Tuesday’s class with an English vocabulary quiz, as we’d been introducing them keywords throughout the previous classes. However instead of passing out quiz papers we simply put English words on the board, one by one, and called on students to translate them into Arabic. This ended up being an effective way of energizing our students, as we made sure to call on everybody and create some sort of a competitive environment.

We adopted the same seating arrangement as the previous class and split the students into teams that they will work with for the remainder of our program. They had previously identified business ideas that they wanted to pursue, so the next thirty minutes of class focused on brainstorming. Again, students were a bit baffled by the concept and adopted more of a “note-taking” mentality as opposed to the team-oriented approach we wanted them to take, so we did our own example of brainstorming to help ease the process.

While many of the students really buy into what we’re trying to teach and believe that they can make a difference, a few of the male students are less engaged. They often distract their peers and make inappropriate comments and we constantly have to remind them to focus. While it is important to remember the circumstances, and that each student requires different attention when learning, it is stressful to have a majority of our class display an eagerness to learn only to be tainted a few students. It almost seems as though they are going out of their way to make the class difficult on us—but perhaps this is a defense mechanism and we need to work harder to allow these students to trust us.

 What is more encouraging, however, is while there are some students who take this opportunity for granted, we have students on the other side of the scale. One teenager, a 17 year-old boy who volunteers at the center for no pay, is an extremely talented video game designer. However, he has no intention of making money from it- despite getting interest from large companies who want to hire him- because he simply does it for fun and wants to give back to his community. It really is eye opening.

It is helpful for us to experience these problems because we are able to take note and approach future programs with more of an open mentality. We are growing every day and with your support we can continue to provide interested students with opportunities to make a difference in their communities. 

What a start to the new week! We gave students thirty minutes to finish off last weeks’ projects (identifying a problem with the IMC Center and proposing ways to solve it) before they had to present it to us. As is evident in the picture above, our students took time to think outside the box and create practical solutions that bettered the IMC Center. The cup holder pictured above, that says “water” in Arabic, was constructed completely by one of the student groups[DV1] [AAM2] —they identified that there were water cups scattered everywhere and made a product to fix it.

Once each project was finished, the groups presented their products, highlighting the resources they used, the value of their product, and who the “customer” was. We also introduced two key terms to encourage peers to help students modify their products, “devil’s advocate” and “constructive criticism”. To our surprise we didn’t need to probe the students to offer advice to the groups presenting- a nice improvement from last week. Everybody was engaged from the start and displayed genuine interest in helping each other improve their respective ideas. This was quite impressive and encouraging to see—however there were times when students were slightly too harsh on each other. We are going to cover these concepts again tomorrow in order to stress that “constructive” is the key word in “constructive criticism”.

We felt that starting off our week like we ended last week, with an engaging activity, was a great way to get our students active and thinking ahead for what will be our final few classes. This week students are going to focus heavily on their communities and how they can become leaders and motivate change. Similarly to the “Foundations of Management and Entrepreneurship” course at Babson, students will now pitch an idea for a product or service that can be implemented into their immediate communities. Each student will focus on identifying the SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) as well as our own version of a business model canvas. Students will pitch their initial ideas in groups of two and then take a blind vote on their favorite three ideas. At this point we’ll start to introduce concepts that each team will be able to apply to their projects, like how to market the product/service as well as how to generate revenue streams.

To top it off, our major partner Fikra Al Mashi was recently recognized for their service to the Jordanian community. As a result, Al-Tareeq was also mentioned in the Jordanian media! We are not only honored but also motivated to continue working hard.

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 [DV1]Tell the reader what the problem was that they wanted to solve.

 [AAM2]

Week 1 reflection

When we found out that we would have to change our curriculum into Arabic, we worried that it would pose a challenge for us to translate all of the concepts properly. Our curriculum is combination of Babson material and some original Al-Tareeq concepts and activities, so we were not sure how students would respond them, but we’re finding ways to keep them focused and active. However, we’re four classes in and the students continue to surprise us—it is going to be extremely hard to leave them.

Day by day, their engagement increases as they learn to solve problems by being critical thinkers and taking matters into their own hands. For the past two days, we’ve had students think about problems in their local community in groups of two. Some of the community problems they identified were lack of motivation in the local work force and inadequate facilities for students to engage in sports. We asked them to then come up with three potential solutions to the problems they’d identified and highlight the skills they thought they needed in order to start solving their problems.  Their solutions were both well thought out and possible to achieve. Once this process was done, each student pitched their idea in front of the class and received feedback from fellow students. We did have to probe the students to give each other constructive criticism, but after the first few pitches students provided each other with valuable feedback. This has helped them become more comfortable around each other and consequently, has led to an increase in participation from some of the quieter students in the class.

During each class we’ve made an effort to introduce new English vocabulary words that are common in the business world. Today, to take a break from conceptual learning, we decided to change things up a little bit. Students had twenty minutes at the start of class to look around the center and find something that they thought needed fixing. Then, with monopoly money, they were asked to “buy” a certain amount of resources that they felt could address the problem. Then they spent the rest of the class designing a product or service that they believed would address the problem. This activity brought our first week to a close in hope that students apply the concepts that we’ve taught throughout the week.

Next week we’ll start to challenge the students to get into teams and start to formulate basic business plans for the problems that they highlighted within their community. We’ve already worked with students on the business model canvas and believe that basic business plans are not out of their reach. We ourselves are learning just as much from these students as they are learning from us. It has been a great experience so far, and we’re already looking forward to next year.