First Day of Class

We’ve touched down in Amman and commenced our first Al-Tareeq entrepreneurship and emotional intelligence program. The first day brought with it a plethora of emotion, as we weren’t sure what to expect in terms of engagement and attendance from the students. The class itself is taking place in Zarqa, forty minutes outside of Amman. We arrived to a room filled with 21 eager students, 14 girls and 7 boys. At the last minute, we decided to translate the curriculum into Arabic to ensure our lessons resonate with the students.

For the first hour we began with two engaging and active icebreakers to help the students feel more comfortable around us and allow us to get to know them. Once we got down to business, we were taken aback by how the students responded to our material. They participated constantly, asking questions, working together, and showing more and more confidence as they presented ideas to their classmates. One 17 year-old student even speaks Arabic, English, Japanese and is learning Chinese- how incredible!

After our icebreakers, we introduced some new concepts in both English and Arabic and showed the students a case study on a local problem. We asked them to form teams, identify the problem, brainstorm solutions, and then complete a basic business model canvas sheet. While at first we were hesitant to ask so much of them, the students surprised us with their passion and dedication to the project. Their solutions were innovative and original, and we were beyond impressed.

What our case study served to show is that nobody is born with an entrepreneurial spirit; rather it is a mindset they can learn. It is a specific set of behavioral tendencies that set entrepreneurs apart from others, and our students started to realize that they themselves could have an impact on their community through entrepreneurship. We want them to understand that not every business needs to be venture capital-backed and that entrepreneurship takes place in all levels of business, no matter how small.

Our first class was an overview of the entire course—the next 9 days will be a more in-detail study of all the concepts we introduced on day one. Day two will cover problem-solving skills and introduce idea generation. Check back tomorrow to learn more about our students!

Our Journey to Entrepreneurial Courses

Along the journey of setting up our organization, reaching out to partners, and further developing our curriculum, we have constantly been reminded of the plight of the Syrian refugees. While the average Middle Eastern student may face a multitude of obstacles due to political situations and other related regional issues, Syrian refugees face a particularly unique struggle. The refugees are in dire need of structural support, and could greatly benefit from a comprehensive entrepreneurship learning program. More importantly, what these students need more than anything else is structured emotional and social support.

Al-Tareeq’s Entrepreneurial Course aims to address all of these issues. The main focus will be to empower these students to pursue their aspirations and solve problems in their communities using an Entrepreneurial Thought and Action framework. We have poured a lot of thought and resources into ensuring we can teach this while still keeping it relatable to their everyday struggles. It will be impossible to teach a program that is removed from their background of hardship and the hurdles they’ll need to overcome to succeed.

A significant part of our curriculum will be dedicated to addressing the specific requirements of the Syrian refugees. We will be dedicating multiple hours per week to giving the students a safe, trusting space where they can open up, discuss their emotions, and create an environment of trust and encouragement. This part of the curriculum will be dedicated to providing a foundation in response to their turbulent backgrounds, so that they can begin to think about how they can tackle social problems with entrepreneurship. We will aim to build an open space that caters to their emotional needs, addressing a multitude of the obstacles they face, such as family and personal issues, political issues, and trauma. We are also planning to include social activities like movie nights and other such events that bring the class and teachers together, as well as provide a source of continuous positivity and understanding.

Ultimately, our goal is to not teach our program in a vacuum. We are working to create the intersection between emotional intelligence, social support and entrepreneurial excellence this summer for these students who, we believe, could truly benefit from it.

Introduction: Our First Blog Post!

Welcome back to Al-Tareeq’s blog. I hope you have all taken some time to navigate our new and improved website, thanks to our new team member Stefano Perrotta.

From September to December, we were all extremely excited about our new venture, which brought us together to make all the progress that we did. However that excitement often made us rush decisions in hope that we could make an impact immediately. While our intentions pointed us in the right direction, we did not take enough time to evaluate our ideas and think about how we could realistically start to make a difference in a community we all value very much.

The last few months have been a great reflection period for our team. We have realised that to make the type of large scale difference that we intend to make, we need to ensure every part of the process is transparent, well thought-out, and meaningful. Our original plan was to host an independent program as a platform to teach high school students in the Middle East, but there is a lot that must be done beforehand. This remains our plan, and reflects our core value proposition, but for the time being, as we grow and expand our network, we have found an exciting opportunity to pursue in the meantime. We will be partnering with Fikra 3al Mashi this summer to teach our curriculum through them. This will be a perfect opportunity to connect with local students and develop our program.

Thus, we have outlined a series of short-term and medium-term goals that we feel will propel us in the right direction, and enable us to carry out each task with extreme detail and passion. To determine what we hope to achieve, we plan on creating very basic interactive videos describing what entrepreneurship is, and uploading them to our website. The hope is that we’re able to use the analytics to find out which areas and types of demographics are interested in learning more about our subject. From that point, we’ll be able to better decide where to focus our time on in the following summer.

Other short-term goals include the supporting of existing social projects, both financially and by simply raising awareness about many different social ventures in the Middle East. Our real goal for the coming few months is to spark a conversation about entrepreneurship in hope of inspiring young, ambitious, regional leaders. We want Al-Tareeq to be a platform for students to excel.