Do you remember what you were hoping for on January 1, 2010? I don’t. I suspect I had the typical naive wishes for the future while expecting more of the same. What was to come was not what I expected at all.
For many of us, the past decade would be the defining one of our lives. It was the decade of Syria, in all its hope and despair. It was the decade we lost a homeland. It’s also the decade that Karam Foundation formed itself as an organization with a clear vision and mission. As we begin a fresh decade, here are my ten most important Karam lessons learned from the last one.
1. You will never be fully prepared for what is to come.
However, you must contribute what you have—in whatever way you can—to help others. And you must know that no matter how bad it gets, it can always get worse. Revolution, war, loss, destruction, and mass displacement teach you this painful lesson. At the beginning of 2010, no one could have predicted what was to happen in Syria and the MENA region. At Karam, we were tiny. Just a few people at my kitchen table. However, our supporters trusted us, and in 2011, they were ready to help as we pivoted to focus exclusively on the Syrian humanitarian crisis. We weren’t prepared, but neither were the Syrians chanting for freedom and dignity on the streets. So we did what we knew: kept an open mind, relied on our networks, and took off.
2. You’re only as strong as your team.
In 2011, as we focused our work on the humanitarian crisis in Syria, we had to restructure our organization to face challenges we were not prepared for (see #1). Still, most people do not know that we hired our first employee in 2015 — four years after the work had become much more than a full-time job. How did we do it? With our amazing volunteer board of directors (many of whom are still serving Karam). As we matured, we realized we needed a dedicated and skilled team to build something sustainable.
Today, Karam is run by a team of over 50 people. The majority of our team are Syrian refugees themselves because we believe the best people to deliver our programs are people from the local community. We also believe that talented, skilled Syrians deserve good jobs that will help them grow as professionals. The people on my team are superheroes. They have witnessed violence and fled their homes with their families. They have grieved and mourned the loss of family members. They have experienced the sting of displacement and are learning to navigate a new home themselves while delivering life-affirming programs to the refugee community around them. They are bravely moving forward with life, getting married, having children, and completing their graduate degrees. They teach me that fully living your life despite hardship is often a form of resistance in itself.
3. Start with one question: what do you need?
As we learned to work in a conflict zone, we realized pretty quickly that what people were given by most aid organizations was not actually determined by what they needed. (With time, we learned that it was much worse than that. Many aid agencies are complicit in the crises they claim to be helping. But that’s a subject for another time.)
We found the best way to figure out what to do was to directly ask the community we intended to serve: What do you need? Then we listened. Then we delivered.
This simple method worked everywhere, from deciding what kind of aid to deliver in besieged areas to designing our innovative education programs. Asking “What do you need?” is the foundation of our work to get children out of child labor and back to school. This also allows us to create scholarships for refugees that make the most sense (ones with no age limits). Asking “What do you need?” pushes us to be in a state of constant evolution to meet the community — not the opposite. After all, the needs of this community are ever-changing and are heavily influenced by the political climate, situational circumstances, and of course, location. Karam acts with people, not for them. And our ultimate goal? To not be needed any longer.
4. Accept the limits of your work.
Soon after the Syrian revolution began, we started working in Homs — where emergency aid was needed most. We spread across the country with the need: Ghouta, Daraa, Damascus, Aleppo, Deir al-Zor, Idlib, and more. As the war’s brutality increased, the geography of our work shrunk while the number of forcibly displaced increased. Working in the war zone became more difficult. One of the most painful lessons was witnessing tragedy unfolding in Syria and knowing that there was absolutely nothing we could do but raise our voices in solidarity. You learn to grieve quietly while focusing on the people you can reach and the impact you can make. The battle we are fighting shifts with time as you begin to understand your place in it. You accept that the revolution is in the work itself.
5. No matter how you try, you can’t end war.
In March 2014, a group of Syrians and allies—including members of the Karam team—stood in front of the White House for 72 consecutive hours reading the names of the first 100,000 Syrians who were killed in the conflict. How Many More? is not a Karam project, but I do consider it to be a formative experience for us. At the time, we did it because we believed that if people, world leaders, and the media really understood the scale of loss of life in Syria, perhaps someone would finally act to end the airstrikes, the chemical attacks, the torture, the genocide.
I remember the first night of readings in DC was so cold. Each reader stood alone, reciting an endless record of the names of innocent civilians who lost their lives in conflict across Syrian cities. A couple of times, I was shocked when names of people I knew came up on my turn to read. That Sunday, we completed the list right before the Revolution’s third anniversary protest. Hundreds of people were there. Our friend and hero, Raed Fares, had come from Syria to join us. We had given him the honor to read the last names. After he finished, he pulled a paper from his pocket and read the names of the martyrs from his town of Kafranbel. Raed would later be assassinated in 2018. Many of the things we have done (and perhaps still do) were with the intention of creating change. It turns out that How Many More? wasn’t about ending the war, but about honoring the loss of each Syrian as a person, not just a number. It was about starting the process of mourning and learning how to memorialize. It will occupy us for many years to come. For now, we still are asking: How many more?
6. The power of one story.
In 2014, I met Omar, a young Syrian refugee, in Reyhanli, Turkey. My encounter with him shifted my view on what was possible to create in the context of despair. I told the story in my TEDx talk. Omar taught me the profound ripple effect of change that we can start with one person. He taught me while we cannot end the war, we can (and must) shape the future for the young people who are victims of this war. This is how we can shift the long term outcome. Today, we have hundreds of examples of young people whose lives have been transformed by their experiences with Karam Foundation’s programs. Much of what we do today stems from this single encounter that grew into many more. On the many, many terrible days that it seems like all our work (collectively) is in vain, I remember Omar’s story and keep going. This is how you measure impact.
7. Go beyond the buzzwords.
In the humanitarian field, certain words like innovation, sustainability, and social change have become rather trendy and flood social media, websites, conferences, and talks. However, when you take a deeper look at the work behind these claims, you may often find that there is not much innovation or sustainable change happening. At Karam, we are allergic to words that are used out-of-context, along with terms like beneficiary, livelihood, and vocational (which we will be reclaiming in 2020) and others that steal people’s dignity and agency. Even the word refugee has become problematic over the last decade, as it has come to represent a person’s worthiness or potential when in reality it only defines a person’s circumstance. We reject this definition and the many claims that are made “on behalf” of people who have the right to steer their own futures. This is why we strive to kill buzzwords and do the good work instead of the good talk.
8. You can’t do this alone.
As the scale of the Syrian crisis grew, we were blessed that our base of support grew, as well. We built partnerships with many local organizations on the ground to implement projects ranging from farms to schools to winter aid. Tens of thousands of people from across the world have donated to Karam. They are the fuel that ignites the Karam engine.
Through our work, we have learned that acts of giving—no matter how big or small—are truly transformative and create a ripple effect that is ever-lasting. We are eternally grateful for every bit of support that keeps us going. It is your radical generosity that allows us to create deep impact in the communities we serve.
9. Home is what you make of it.
Building two Karam Houses really taught us the importance of creating a place for refugee youth to heal, grow, and belong. The young Syrians who come to Karam House (sometimes commuting for over one hour each way) are dedicated, inspiring, and committed to shaping their futures. Our spaces provide them with opportunities to recreate new memories of home and community. They have taught me that home is not what we have lost, but what we are making/creating/inventing every day. It is not where we are from, but where we are going. Witnessing 10,000 young people becoming leaders over the next ten years is what I’m looking forward to most.
10. The question of hope: do I still have hope?
To be honest, some days I have no hope. Sometimes, despair drowns me. There were far too many days to count when I lost people I loved and when we scrolled through endless death on our social media feeds. It’s times like these when I remind myself of that spring day in 2011 when I gave myself the pseudonym Amal (Hope). I did so because I believed that we all represent something better for the future. The young people we serve embody this. They are proof that what we build is at least as important as what we have lost. And so we move forward, remembering the past, never forgetting who we are or the sacrifices of others, and we build something better, together. That is hope. We don’t act because we hope, we hope because we act.
Thank you for being part of our journey so far. I hope you stay with Karam for many years to come. May the new decade bring peace, justice, and freedom to all humans.
With love & gratitude,
Lina