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Using Her Strength and Success to Guide Her Children’s Futures
“I made an oath to myself,” Ensaf said, “that I will begin a new step to build a future for me and the generation that comes after me.” Oath-making is serious business. When ISIS controlled Mosul, the city was a prison for women who didn’t pledge allegiance to the group. Morality...
Using Her Strength and Success to Guide Her Children’s Futures
When ISIS took Ekhlas’s hometown, it was an utterly ordinary day. Her children were watching cartoons on TV and she had a doctor’s appointment to get ready for. Then she stepped outside her home and normality vanished. “The streets were empty,” she remembers. “It was completely silent. If you had...
He Didn’t Want to Kill. Now He Invests in Other’s Lives.
When he was younger, Sulaiman dreamt of being a geologist. He was fascinated by the landscape of Syria. Captivated by the idea of working in nature, outside the confines of an office. For a while, he was living out his dream, studying geology near his hometown in northern Syria. Then...
Building Today’s Leaders One Soft Skill at a Time
Rand recalls her younger self saying, “I will never work in finance. I hate dealing with money.” Today, Rand is the Finance and Administrative Coordinator at a tech hub in Mosul, Iraq, that focuses on developing entrepreneurship, innovation, and tech-based jobs. Her goal is to earn a Master of...
How our Tech Program Helped this Young Yazidi Launch his Career
When Sufyan was in college, he wanted to get a job. His IT skills were good, but he wasn’t receiving offers. Frustrated, he heard about our program to teach the technical and interpersonal skills necessary to flourish in today’s job market, from one of his friends. Intrigued, he decided...
Watch Out Elon Musk: There’s a New Entrepreneur in Town
Hassan has big dreams. Like his hero Elon Musk, Hassan wants to become a successful entrepreneur. His plan is to harvest the power of technology to help feed his community and his country, Lebanon, and he’s determined to do this before he’s 30. Hassan’s given himself ten years. Lebanon is...
Making Safe Spaces in Tech Shifts Culture
“We’ve had people coming into the program, especially women, come in and say ‘I do this for my daughter. I do this for my son, so I can teach them something that I know they would not get from school.’ And that’s encouraging because she’s not the only generation...
I do not like to be idle, and I know this will help me feel useful again
Siryi is a proud mom to 2 lovely girls, and even though the arrival of the oldest put a hold on her studies (she was studying her undergrad), there is no denying how much they are loved by both their parents. While they were living in Honduras, Siryi sold...
Deran Muhammed ali Hasan
Freelance Graphic Designer As a young returnee, Hiwa was a very active person with a lot of eagerness to learn and for adventure. He believes that without consistency, hard work, and failure, success is not possible.