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.