7 Hills for Social Development, Jordan

7Hills is a community based, skateboarders driven, non-profit that works to create safe public spaces and activate them through free of charge activities with the aim of establishing youth empowerment programs in Jordan. 7Hills bridges the gap between socio-economic, cultural, religious, and gender differences to create harmonized spaces for youths from all walks of life, including refugee youth.

The spaces harness an open, democratic environment for everyone in the city of Amman struggling with social barriers giving all children, youth, and parents a safe, public space to skateboard, socialize, and unwind.

7hills for Social Development and its social enterprise arm Al Raseef 153 are focused on sustainable localization, participatory project development, youth mobilisation for the development of public urban spaces through building and installing social infrastructure, activating these spaces through free of charge activities, youth leadership programs, and informal creative crafts trainings in their hub; to have achievable, scalable, lasting, sustainable, and replicable programs.

Since 2014 till today, 7Hills has been building a very diverse community of young people with over 10 different nationalities. They work with host, migrant and refugee communities including Jordanian, Syrian, Palestinian, Lebanese, Sudanese, Somali, Yemeni, Egyptian, Nigerian, Filipino, Iraqi youths between the ages of 5 and 35 years.

Learn more about the organization by visiting their website: 7hillspark.com.

Amel Association International, Lebanon

Amel Association is a Lebanese non-profit, non-sectarian organization committed to human rights since 1979. One of its main objectives is to endorse and encourage a sense of belonging and citizenship in Lebanese and Arab communities. This sense stems from the maintenance of individual civil rights, and protection from all forms of discrimination based on colour, religion, or political affiliation and it is the first Lebanese NGO to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

With its experience of over 30 years in Lebanon, Amel became an International association on December 15, 2010 and was registered in the directory of international NGOs. The purpose was to share experiences around the world and to strengthen its collaborations with other international NGOs. Thus Amel Association acquired the status of International association registered in Geneva.

Amel’s work with refugees has been part of its core mandate since its creation. Initially supporting Lebanese and displaced Lebanese, Amel has expanded its scope of action in solidarity with vulnerable populations, providing humanitarian aid to refugee communities, irrespective of nationality, across the entire country. The programs implemented by Amel cover different sectors such as health, food security, education, protection, gender and rural development, and livelihoods.
Amel’s aim is to support refugees in covering their basic needs, as well as empowering them to rebuild their lives and contribute to the development of their societies, for that Amel cooperates with the new actors of humanitarian aid and uses technology to better serve beneficiaries, such as (the Synchronous IVR Radio for instance). Moreover, it establishes innovative projects which allow greater reach and impact, such as its two mobile education units. The "educational bus" visits the Syrian refugees camps to deliver educational activities for the children.

Learn more about the organization by visiting their website: amel.org

Dignity for Children Foundation, Malaysia

In 1998 founders Elisha Satvinder and his wife Petrina, discovered many underprivileged families in the Sentul area of Malaysia, many of whom were refugees. Concerned for their welfare they started to reach out to the community through basic home improvement services, grocery distribution, arrangement of free medical check-ups, raising support for school supplies, job placement and counselling. They started the initiative in their own house when very few individuals knew about refugees.

They realized that with the limited resources at their disposal, their contributions would not bring about the results they wanted to see. Believing that quality education was the key to breaking the cycle of poverty they started to focus their efforts on education. What began as simple tuition classes in 1998 began to attract daily attendance of over 50 students, however children who were already behind continued to struggle, so their focus started to include toddlers and preschool children. His work was done under name of Harvest Centre in 2003 and the first Montessori preschool for the underprivileged opened its doors to 30 students in January 2004. As education programmes began to grow, the primary and secondary education programmes were added.

In 2010, all Harvest Centre education projects came under the name of Dignity.

Learn more about the organization by visiting their website: dignityforchildren.org