As a truth seeker Nawal has always been eager to know the “why” behind everything: Why is life the way it is? Why are people the way they are? Why is life is sometimes not fair? The urge to answer these questions led her to certain paths in life: education, entrepreneurship sustainability and social research. Therefore, while in college, she volunteered in student organizations and worked on education and research-related development projects. Her experiences have led her to the conclusion that she dreams of contributing to the community development sector as a development practitioner.
Khouloud Faizy
Khouloud works to create change in the health care services, for them to be human-centered and gender oriented. She graduated as a midwife from the higher school of health sciences and techniques in 2021. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in human rights and international humanitarian law, in parallel with a master’s degree in governance of public policy. In 2021, she won the Ambassador for a Day competition that was organized by the British Embassy in Tunisia. She co-founded an independent movement, Ambassadors for Equality, which provides programs to empower underserved girls and young women to claim their rights and create a healthier environment where they can live free from discrimination and violence. She and her team implemented two programs, TeenGirlsLead and Power Voices Challenge.
Khoulud’s journey with the Academy of National Dialogue (AND) began in 2020 as a project manager. She managed a team, organized and moderated 2 seminars about gender equality and women’s rights, one in collaboration with the municipality of Tunis, and the other in collaboration with the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), where she demonstrated great public speaking and team-work skills. She also organized and moderated online seminars about education, environment and local authority after the pandemic. She is a trainer in human rights, gender equality, and democracy, and has facilitated workshops and dialogue sessions on different subjects.
Ghazoua Selmi
Ghazwa is from Kairouan, so she moved to Tunis to pursue the Lazord Fellowship. This choice was a little bit irrational from her side because she resigned from a job, had to leave her family and try to adapt to a whole new life. However, it’s been worth it because she is doing things with passion. She is willing to learn and earn a well-reputed career with an international organization like Soliya, where she is placed through the Lazord Fellowship.
If Ghazwa had a magic wand, she would give every one the right to receive an education, and she would eradicate wars and famines.
Haya Naber
Haya graduated from The University of Jordan with a B.Sc. in Human Nutrition and Dietetics. Her passion and success enabled her to get the Distinguished Student scholarship at her university. During her academic studies and after graduating, Haya worked with airlines, clinics, and hospitals. These experiences enabled her to gain technical and management skills.
Haya’s journey in civic engagement started when she was in school in the form of volunteerism by taking part in the school’s small initiatives that benefited her community. Her journey continues to this day.
In her last academic year, Haya combined the knowledge she gained in her studies with her passion for nutrition and public health, leading teams on a non-profit platform aiming to spread nutritional awareness to Arabic-speaking audiences. Haya also enjoyed volunteering in diverse areas through nahno.org, the national platform for volunteering and youth participation. Haya thinks that these experiences enlightened her on issues and obstacles that people face in our community.
If Haya had a superpower to change the world for the better, it would be to grant good health to everyone because the foundation of all happiness is health. According to Haya, health is indeed a divine gift to humankind.
Mu’taz Alhulayil
Mu’taz holds a degree in business administration from Yarmouk University in Jordan. Since his early childhood, he was drawn to community service activities. He is a hard-working and proactive individual with strong problem-solving and communication skills and the ability to learn new concepts fast. He is very passionate about community service projects and has been involved in many projects as a volunteer in youth support and women empowerment programs with different NGOs in Jordan. He believes that the most important factors for success in the career life are to love your field, desire and perseverance to learn, and to have a short and long-term vision that you strive to achieve.
Abeer Hasan
Abeer is a passionate, hardworking, and professional individual who holds an excellent degree in translation and interpretation. Abeer is an alumna of the MEPI Student Leaders Program, a one-year program that includes a five-week residency in the United States. Abeer is also an alumna of the Access Microscholarship Program, a US Embassy program consisting of 400 academic hours, that took place at World Associates. Her personal and professional achievements allowed her to do a professional training in project management, which gave her the opportunity to implement a successful teaching project at SOS Village in Irbid, made possible by a generous fund from the U.S Embassy in Amman.
What really makes Abeer stand out is her continuous willingness to share the knowledge she gets. She always prefers that information should not stop when it reaches her; she feels the responsibility of reciprocity.
Ahlam Gamal
Ahlam has a B.A. in Fine Arts from the Graphic Department/Animation and Book Art. She is interested in culture and arts and their role in societal change as the primary drivers for expressing ideas and needs. She strongly believes in the role of the arts in developing societies in a way that includes and allows all individuals to be honest, equal, open and confident in themselves and in others.
Through the Lazord Fellowship she works as a cultural coordinator with Collective Routes. Her role is to provide support for the implementation of projects and support in planning, monitoring and evaluating project activities, providing visual content for various tools and researches, and working on developing cultural work and making it available to the community.
She was the program coordinator for community empowerment at Ruwwad, which works to empower young people through their learning journeys and enhances their role in community participation and services. Her role was to design educational processes for women in eradicating illiteracy, promoting free education, empowerment, and awareness of their issues.
She is on the national team of ambassadors of National Dialogue Egypt, which works to promote a culture of dialogue and peaceful coexistence, as they believe that dialogue is a type of art people use to express their ideas to reach solutions and ideas on how to develop society without excluding any of its members.
She also works on documenting the oral heritage of marginalized areas in order to revive them as an important part of the country’s culture in that they give us events from the point of view of people from the street where they differ or agree with the reliable historical vision of historians. She created a website to document the oral literature of one of the slums in Egypt. Also, her graduation project was an illustrated story of an Egyptian folk story of a young Egyptian hero “Ali Al-Zeibaq”.
She was a co-founder in establishing a cinema space in the Old Cairo area to raise awareness of gender, using cinema with the Art Association for Development. Among the Fael Cultural Program, which works at the regional level to spread culture and arts in complex societies, from the “Action for Hope” organization, she believes that culture and the arts have an effective role in spreading coexistence among members of society, as well as the need for cultural relief for youth and children in various regions, especially marginalized areas.
Nadine Ellaban
Nadine is a passionate individual in the development field. Nadine started her journey with the development field when she was granted an exchange program scholarship under the name of KL-YES program. Nadine was placed in the state of Massachusetts in the United States where she started volunteering and engaging with the society in which she lived. Moreover, Nadine was chosen for the Civic Education Workshop held in Washington D.C. At the end of her exchange program, Nadine was granted a certificate from the department of state as a reward for volunteering for more than 100 hours during her exchange year. After Nadine returned to Egypt, she completed her undergraduate studies in political science.
At the heels of earning a BSc in Political Science and completing a thesis for women empowerment, Nadine was granted the Lazord Fellowship and is currently placed at GIZ Egypt in the Employment Promotion Unit. Nadine aspires to be part of empowering the women of Egypt and enhancing the quality of education inside Egypt.
If she had a superpower, she would want it to be the ability to end poverty in order to make the world a better place.
Manar Abdullah
Manar Issam Abdullah is a passionate soul, a dedicated humanist and an ambitious civil engineer who graduated from the University of Jordan. She has always been involved in organizing and facilitating educational and charity projects with the goal of making the world a better place in mind. Moreover, during her university years she participated in different charity activities with several foundations, but her official journey started when she became a lead coordinator at The Camp of Gaza Support Campaign (TCGSC) to help the camp residents, especially disadvantaged children and adolescents, to achieve better education, to elevate their local health awareness levels, and to gain essential life skills.
This experience allowed her to improve her skills in leadership, adaptability and strategic planning. She has always aimed to become an agent of change in the fields of child’s rights, education, women empowerment, and supporting the welfare of refugee communities. Furthermore, stemming from her belief that music is a universal language that brings humans closer, she studied and practiced to get her ‘oud’ instrument diploma.
She worked with Madrasati Initiative for almost two years to help improve the physical and educational learning environments of Jordan’s most underprivileged public schools.
For eight months, she worked hard on the Lazord Final Research Project titled, “Period Poverty among Women in Poverty Pockets in Mafraq Governorate, Jordan,” a project that was the first of its kind in Jordan and the Middle East. Her group won at the national competition, and were qualified to compete at the regional competition.
Manar has started a new chapter in her life by working with the Embassy of Ireland in Jordan to help improve educational learning environments across Jordan and promote the annual Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition (STEM-related) in Jordan, which was launched in Ireland over 50 years ago. All of these aspects and experiences have aided her in becoming the person she is today.
In addition, Manar is responsible for the green team at the Embassy of Ireland. Green team has started setting yearly reviews to get baselines to understand what is needed and how to improve on aspects in both the embassy and the residence.
Most recently, Manar worked on a position paper, “The Effect of Climate Change on Agriculture Sustainability in Jordan.” She was the moderator and the main speaker who presented this paper to the Minister of Agriculture as well as the Minister of Environment in Jordan.
Al Muthana Mufleh
Multiple circumstances, life changes, lessons, loss, lies, and too many other things to count have shaped AlMuthana (Dr. Alex) into the person he is today.
The person who he is today is a result of living in three different countries, dealing with people and cultures all around the world, having the insight of a doctor who tells him how the human body works and how to deal with the human being at his weakest, combining being a human and curing one. One sphere of knowledge won’t grant you success and that one sphere is not enough to proceed in life and have an impact upon others’ lives.
Becoming a Lazord Fellow put Dr. Alex in a test that sculpted his skills and gave him insight into what he is capable of learning and doing, implementing his skills, and coming up with a more aware person of what is the meaning of an opportunity, and giving it to himself.
He became a Lazord Fellow to be a part of a community that holds two important words as an aim. “Responsible leader” sees that the first word is scary to state but yet the second one is tempting to hold. Dr. Alex believes that the way to achieve your dreams and ambitions is taking responsibility for your own actions and leading yourself to greatness by learning and spreading the knowledge a person can gain.
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Dr. Alex is a very sophisticated person that has always pushed himself beyond the traditional paths of life and stereotypical life He didn’t limit his life choices within his major but he also went beyond to discover, develop skills and experiences in other aspects that made him involved and evolve in the social and management of life aspects in three different countries. When he started his journey in Medicine he had the honour to claim the position of the Batch leader and advancing all the way to become the first-ever foreign president of the faculty of his university where he worked thoroughly with students and their well-being, academic development. Dr. Alex also became a TV host to spread awareness on matters that help maintain the original concept of humanity and working hard.
“Once you stop learning, you stop living” – Dr. Al Muthana Mufleh
