Community Organizing,
Network Building & Leadership

Highlighted Project 1

Arisanal Food Producers Network (AFPN)

in collaboration with Nawaya and Slow Food Egypt

This work entailed:

Through consulting for Nawaya LLC and Slow Food Egypt, I created a network of Egypt's Artisanal Food Producers for the revival of heritage food, providing small-scale, local food producers with collective power and market access.
The work I undertook involved:
- Exploring the needs and challenges of the communities of the small scale producers through multiple community meetings, relationship building, partnerships with local NGOs and participatory processes with the producers
- Researching evidence-based practices and cases for small-scale artisanal producers network creation, collective action and power around the world
- Recruiting small scale producers to form the core of the network according to value and vision alignment
- Creating a governance and an operational structure for the network through facilitating participatory, community building approaches
- Designing and Prototyping several projects, managing events and opening pathways for partnership to allow for producers' collaboration across the network and producer-consumer connections. Such prototypes included:
  - producer-to-producer exchange and peer learning, collective recipe creation and innovation workshops, farmers/slow food markets, consumer awareness events, community gardening events, common delivery projects, collective menu creation as well as tasting and catering events inviting media, CSOs and corporates to such events
- Facilitating several trainings in terms of design of the learning experience for the producers on nutrition-based food value, hygiene and creating market linkages, with technical trainers for technical content
- Connecting small-scale artisanal producers to youth in their local communities, where the youth can handle the social media and marketing work for the food produced in these local communities. Trained youth on life and job skills to be a part of the network
Tools and methods used: community-building canvas, teal organizations' management methods like holocracy and human-centered organizational governance, human centered design, participatory research methods, socio-metric methods for community needs assessment, theory of change development, community arts methods (theater, storytelling, and collective singing), action methods, agile management tools. See facilitation & training page for more details.
The project was conducted for two years while the network continues to operate until present.

Other Sample Projects

Ecoversities Alliance

A global alliance of 200+ higher education institutions re-imagining education from a decolonial, place-based, experiential perspective reclaiming diverse knowledge ecologies and cosmologies (ways of being and knowing in the world)

In this alliance, I act as a "Germinator": supporting the nurturance of existing projects and sprouting new ones and a "Pollinator": helping to spread the alliance's work to new territories and networks, besides being on the alliance's advisory council

Through this alliance, I contribute to a global re-imaginative movement in higher education. My contributions and work involve:

Co-creating a governance mechanism using autonomous, consent-based tools and strategic actions for a global movement of 200+ connected organizations across the globe based on emergence and inquiry in solidarity
Building relationships and co-creating an identification and mentorship (gardening) program that shares and exchanges learning among established organizations of the alliance to newly budding organizations with similar values
Co--organize learning journeys to learning initiatives around the world to build trans-national solidarity and support
Co-organize global gatherings (200+ people events) for organizations and members in the alliance to exchange learning and re-imagining education conferences (1000+ people events) that share the alliance’s and its members’ work with larger audiences across the globe, and to invite key players to shift discourse and thought about the future of higher education

We See Africa

A campaign directed at Harvard University's curriculum, classroom strategies and policies

Led a campaign called #WeSeeAfrica, to reclaim an African narrative at Harvard University and diversify the curriculum, pedagogies, and programming to better represent African reality, better serve African students and their contexts, and better include African thoughts and worldviews through decolonial praxis. This work involved:

recruited 20 constituency members
drafted a bill of rights for African students at Harvard, conducted research on decolonial education methodologies and African-centered education
built relationships and mobilized support from faculty, administrators and 100 students to sign the bill of rights and present it to schools' deans and teaching and learning centers
wrote social media messages, and created a second-tier leadership team to continue the campaign efforts
This work was guided and mentored by Marshall Ganz's (Harvard's university professor and global organizer) community organizing principles and frameworks

Education startups begin to break through in Egypt

Mesahat: Liberating Learning Spaces

A grass-roots movement starting in Cairo, Egypt that envisions the creation of learning cities, spreading values, tools and principles of self-directed, agile, life-long democratic and critical education for citizens

I founded and directed Mesahat for 4 years. Through this, some of the work I did involved:
- Organized more than 20 community dialogues, events, seminar series, awareness workshops touring Egypt, hosting: global speakers, inspirational models from around the world, inspirational local educational models from projects and families in Egypt and connecting academic researchers to the public on topics of popular, self-directed and community-based education
- Designed an opensource toolkit and a mentorship program for the model to be implemented by any community groups
- Built relationships and mobilized different constituencies from parents to NGOs to get engaged with it.
- Fruition/results: I started a community learning center engaging 200 families for inter-generational learning. 4 other community groups started similar community learning spaces in their own neighborhoods. A community dialogue has started with different action groups inquiring into, learning about, exchanging and prototyping models of Agile Education (#agileEd & #ALCCairo), #Self-directed learning (#SDE_Egypt) and in Arabic using the hashtag #تعليم_حر
For a full feature on Mesahat, see the Social Entrepreneurship page, bottom section

Ashoka Fellowship (Social Entrepreneurs), Nominators and Changemakers Networks

For a full feature on my work with Ashoka building networks of high impact leading social entrepreneurs and young changemakers across Arab States and globally, please check the Social Entrepreneurship page.

Skills Focus for Community Organizing and Network Building

building relationships, creating strategy-based action, creating networks for collective power, creating campaigns for social change and policy advocacy, recruiting constituency, building capacity and coaching of local leadership, assessment of community based challenges and needs, co-creation and participatory processes for social change, power analysis, negotiations, spreading messages and galvanizing around a vision for social change, mobilizing support from various stakeholders, designing and implementing different levels of engagement and action for various stakeholders, building alliances around common interests, stakeholder and faction mapping and analysis

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Community Organizing, Network Building & Leadership