I have trained civil society activists and leaders across the globe, from Hong Kong to South Africa to across the Arab world, most recently in Syria months before Assad was ousted.
In the early stages of my career, I served as a grassroots civil society organizer with the Ibn Khaldun Center in Egypt. In 2005, I mobilized hundreds of young Egyptians to monitor the nation's first presidential elections and trained democracy advocates and civil society groups in nonviolent strategies to counter government repression. This work led to my invitation to the Fletcher Summer Institute at Tufts University, where I received advanced training in nonviolent civil resistance and peacebuilding.
In 2007, I joined Freedom House and leveraged my networks and experiences to launch the "New Generation of Advocates" program. I was instrumental in securing grants and managing this multi-million-dollar USAID-funded initiative, which facilitated exchanges for young civil society leaders from the Middle East to learn from counterparts in democratic transition countries like Serbia and Poland and nations with successful transitional justice efforts such as South Africa and Chile.
As a diaspora organizer, I organized a broad coalition of diasporic activists before the 2011 Egyptian uprising. Six months before the revolution, we pushed for Egyptians abroad to be allowed to vote using their national ID rather than the government’s manipulated voter lists—uniting opposition forces inside and outside Egypt. Instead of staging another protest at the Egyptian embassy in D.C., we held a mock presidential election with a retired judge and media representatives supervising the ballot. Over 100 Egyptians participated, and we delivered the results to embassy staff, demonstrating that fair elections were possible. The event went viral in Egyptian independent media, and after the revolution, our protest was cited as an example of how to implement free and fair elections.