KAF’s Culture: Embodying our Ethos
Kuwait-America Foundation Staff with DtWT Summer Interns, 2018
Written by Shereen Abdel-Nabi
I first joined the Kuwait-America Foundation (KAF) as a Do the Write Thing (DtWT) summer intern. It was the summer of 2002, I had just graduated from the University of Virginia with a BA in Foreign Affairs and Middle East Studies, and was looking for a fulfilling internship to bookend a gap year I was taking to prepare for graduate school and to spend quality time with my family. Two DtWT summer internships, a Masters in Arab Studies from Georgetown University, and 15 years later, I can, without hesitation, say that that summer changed the trajectory of my life. What began as a casual summer internship with a group of strangers has turned in to a second home with an extended family.
While my first experience with the foundation was working on the DtWT program, my current role includes any and all programs or projects established or supported by KAF, including social impact initiatives and community partnerships. As a smaller foundation, my position as KAF Program Director affords me the very large opportunity to build and sustain relationships between people and organizations committed to investing in people and strengthening communities across the globe. The chance to be part of a group of people committed to supporting anyone in need anywhere has been one of the greatest privileges I’ve been afforded.
Since joining KAF as a full-time team member in 2005, I have experienced first-hand not only the growth of the organization, but more importantly, the values it espouses and embraces wholeheartedly. As a foundation, our mission to empower individuals and communities, building ties that cross continents, is not only reflected in the work we do around the world, but in our organizational ethos as well. Anyone who has ever worked with, or for KAF, knows that what we aim to do outside of our four walls, is exactly what guides how we work together and treat each other within them. Ours is a beautifully unique environment built upon respect and support, and my KAF family is one that has sustained me for over a decade and one that continues to play a vital role in my life.
As a non-profit organization, the impact that KAF and the DtWT program have had on people across the U.S. and the globe is immeasurable. Nowhere, however, is the vital opportunity and support that KAF provides clearer to me than when meeting and speaking with young people here in the U.S. who have been part of the DtWT program. While KAF supports multi-million dollar large-scale projects across continents, providing essential resources that facilitate change, it is truly the middle schoolers whose voices we seek to not only listen to, but amplify, who exemplify what investing in people really looks like. The beauty of our mission is most apparent when we hear from the young students that have been positively impacted by their participation in the DtWT program. The space they have been given to speak their minds to an audience that values not only their opinions but their inherent worth as individuals, is key to their growth and successes in the program. Meeting current and former DtWT participants who credit the program with giving them the platform, the impetus, the drive, the support, and the confidence to be change-makers in their own lives and communities, inspires me to be better and do better.
Unique to all of our work, is that the ability to have meaningful conversations and make a significant impact locally and globally is primarily funded by the people of Kuwait -
the citizens and corporations and foundations of Kuwait whose generosity knows no bounds. Of course, the reputation of hospitality and benevolence among the Arab world is well-known, and I can certainly think of no organization that better embodies that spirit than the Kuwait-America Foundation.
