One day in March 2015, a group of young “refugees” agreed that they would play a real part in changing people’s lives — and that they would not leave this life without a distinctive mark proving they were more than numbers.
These young people saw that martyrs give their lives for what they believe in, so they decided to give their lives — their living years — for their nation.
They disliked the distorted picture that some colonial tools paint of Arab life, Arab culture and Arab civilisation. Putting their own culture to the test became a decisive touchstone — and it produced Yarob: an idea born of Arab culture, made by Arab hands.
We are those young people. Our experience took shape under the name Yarob… and this is our story.
When we tell Yarob’s story, we are not just summoning the feelings of a group of people. Nor does it call for scientific proof or precise measures to sort success from failure. We are describing something that exists now: a distinctive culture shared by thousands of people, an important way of thinking that helps them face hard lives and harsh conditions — a mix of success and failure, captive dreams and moving pain. We are telling how ideas unfolded, and so how achievements, living and dead, came in stages: ideas that started with people, led to events, and formed a reality that matters in public work — national, humanitarian, social, youth and children’s work. We look at that reality with the eye of someone who belongs, the insight of a fighter, the telling of an objective narrator and an intention of reasonable disclosure, in language that is plain yet precise, sensitive, coherent and honest — in an effort that expresses Yarob’s mission, and so as a step forward: the step of all steps.
A youth group formed through many factors — humanitarian, national and social concern, geographic closeness, poverty, university life and political experience — which made them friends and warm, bold brothers, eager to change the world by turning their worry into will, their pain into hope and their work into a destination. Or so they once claimed.
The group tried many things. Some showed a refugee’s innocence, some a fighter’s resolve, some shrewdness and good judgement; and the rest could only be described — beyond any dispute — as bold, humane and reckless, and full of belonging, all at once.
The group — young people aged from 11 to 23 — decided to start working in an organised way, quietly declared. They tried volunteering with children, and after more than ten months decided to found an organisation dedicated to working with children. They met in the last week of March 2015 to agree on their core purpose and their own point of origin: the camp.
We see the camp as a symbol, and Al-Nasr as a starting point: the Prince Hassan Quarter camp, known as Al-Nasr Camp, in the east of Amman.
The camp as symbol: it stands for a sincere direction that never strays from the national compass or the humanitarian path, and it protects the group from any intellectual drift or practical slide. It is a symbol of return and liberation, the home of worry that ferments into will — and the source of pain that evaporates and condenses into hope.
The camp as place: the group that started the work judged, by reason and good sense, that beginning in Amman in a relatively small camp would let us keep failure in check — failure being the ghost that always haunts beginnings. And since the socially influential people at the grassroots were sons of this camp, it was wise to start and settle here, building on their efforts to move towards what we wanted.
And so, up to now in 2023, the founders have discovered that they built the components explained below.
The components on which the idea of Yarob rests:
Component one: Working with children in Al-Nasr Camp
This component is the seed for which all the others were built. Our thinking pointed to one goal: how can we add something real, lasting and meaningful to the record of our civilisation, our cause and our society? Working with children was the answer everyone agreed on — there is no better path to change. Our reasons for choosing this field came down to the following points:
We cannot change the past, but we must prepare a generation that can make the future.
We cannot start a new idea in the usual way of shallow ‘creativity’; we must continue the path of those who came before us in this field, within a defined context.
We must confront the shabby way children are often worked with — not by clashing, but by offering good working models and showing renewed methods.
Drawing on what young people learned at university to renew and develop the work.
Being moved by the sayings and quotations that see working with children as essential to the change and progress of nations.
The human and national void that schools — and so children — suffer from.
The experience most of the group had in what is called youth work (al-‘amal al-fityani).
To make the details clear, we need to pause on the idea of youth work — something Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan created. Based on what we learned from those who founded and joined it, we explain the following:
In 1971 the Palestinian refugee camps were still groaning from the wound of the Nakba — the forced displacement and ethnic cleansing carried out against the Arab Palestinian people in 1948 by the gangs of the Zionist movement and British colonialism. That wound reopened, deepened and spread after the June 1967 defeat (the Naksa), igniting in refugees a burning desire to take the initiative — at the very least over their living conditions, and at most militarily and therefore politically. In the early 1970s this produced an idea: the need for a safe, stimulating environment for orphaned children in the camps, whether they had lost their fathers as martyrs in fedayeen operations and wars, or for other reasons.
The spark of this idea — which might seem ordinary at first sight — came through the orphan boys’ camp, led by a group of the finest young people: educated, ambitious, humane and patriotic. It was repeated every year until it spread through the refugee camps in Jordan: the idea of the summer orphans’ camp was adapted into a weekly activity every Friday morning at the community youth centres in the camps. Since those taking part in the annual camp were themselves sons of the camps, they carried the activity and its idea from a yearly camp to a weekly gathering that cared for orphan boys’ education, culture, sport and studies.
This system, this phenomenon, this milieu, is what is called youth work (al-‘amal al-fityani). It grew with its tools, circumstances, people and society, and today takes the form of orphan boys’ committees attached to youth clubs in the camps, or specialised charities dedicated to orphan boys.
The nucleus of youth work is the annual orphans’ camp, known as the Naour Camp (because it is held at UNRWA’s Amman Training College in Naour). It brought together the first generation of the idea — leaders and boys alike — and is the main channel through which the idea spread. It is worth mentioning, with pride, that this nucleus is still held today, now in its 47th edition.
How can we tell what counts as youth work and what does not? It is a complex question. We may see youth work as a popular phenomenon born of the will of refugees and the elites among our people — but in practice, how do we tell it apart from other activities with children? We can build our ideas together by documenting our experience and reach good conclusions. This is where the challenges began.
Challenges are natural, to be expected and healthy — but the way we engage and respond to them shows how bold a group is and how serious its members are.
When a group of thirteen young men and ten children met and resolved to work with children as an extension of youth work, their first challenge arose. It was an intellectual one: how to sort the groups active with children into those that belong to youth work and those that don’t. The initial agreement was that classification did not matter for the sake of distinction or creating a pointless sub-identity — what mattered was defining our field so we could move forward from a serious, clear awareness. To get the idea off the ground, the group decided: we are youth work, and we don’t need to classify others who work with children. Work with children in Jordan falls clearly into the following:
The Islamic milieu (Quran-memorisation associations and centres, or those focused solely on religious education)
The scouting milieu (scout groups following the global scouting method, whatever their legal differences)
The youth-work milieu (orphan committees and boys’ associations that see themselves as part of this milieu through certain rituals and relationships, participants’ backgrounds and experience, and their ties to the Naour Camp)
Others (associations, clubs or centres linked perhaps by football, class or region… etc.) — usually not connected by a shared event, and not necessarily linked or in any bloc or alliance.
From here it became clear that our idea grew out of our experience in and belonging to youth work. The group had varied experience across the camps: some came from the Prince Hassan Quarter Club, some from Al-Mahatta Club, some from the Al-Mahatta Orphans’ Association, some from Al-Awda Club — and all of them were, at the time, on excellent terms with youth work across the camps.
But we had agreed one thing in advance: we would not work only with orphans. Most of youth work focuses on the humanitarian, relief and educational side of caring for orphans — and that is not what we wanted. Society’s real need, as we see it from our grassroots experience, is not limited to orphans alone. Some of those who work with orphans have even strayed from the national compass and the humanitarian principle, sliding into a form that harms orphaned children one way or another and endangers the idea. Some even beg on the children’s behalf, presenting them as a pitiful, broken group drowning in tears and sighs. Yes — the melodramatic image of orphans: the image that destroys everything we have in mind, and one we fundamentally reject on ethical grounds.
That is not what our work is for… and not why we will carry on. We offer our idea for the sake of personal and public development.
As soon as the youth group met, they named themselves the Founding Body; the group of ten children followed with their own meeting and named themselves the Support Team. We gathered our ideas and abilities to apply for a charity licence, went to the Ministry of Social Development, understood what the law required, and then began thinking about a name. After much back and forth while preparing the official papers for registration and licensing, we set the criteria the name had to meet:
It must not refer to a specific group, such as orphans or the poor (we want to work with all children).
It should be smooth, simple and fresh (to catch the eye and be easy to remember).
It must not be trivial, naive or shallow (because we take what we believe in seriously).
It should be inclusive and suggest no division or discrimination (in line with our policy of bringing people together and building up).
It must not point to a specific area or camp (so we can spread and grow in future).
It should be tied to our faith and our liberation culture (as an expression of who we are).
It must suggest no religious or political ideology (to keep social work independent from politics).
After no ordinary effort, a name emerged: Yarob. Is it after Yarob bin Qahtan? Not the man himself, but what he is seen to be: the forefather of the Arabs, said to be the first to speak Arabic and give it order — a historical reference point for dealing with an Arab world lost in making small sub-identities that colonialism created and racism, ignorance and narrow interests feed. It is also our acknowledgement that Arabism is a culture, not a race; a civilisation, not a tribe — one that gathers ethnicities and cultures into a vast, rich Arab identity. That is one reason. What sealed our love for the name was a dream: one day we would make our mark in social development worldwide, and we would be asked about the name — and we would tell the story of Arabism, as civilisation and culture, through the name Yarob. We want it under this name because we firmly believe it will express the Arab imprint on social development worldwide.
Did we really make a difference? Or was it a claim born of youthful enthusiasm, vigour and too little wisdom? We claim no difference unless we link the making to the maker… We made youth leadership. When the official procedures moved forward — and it was no secret that conflicts swirled around this group, whose members, as we said, came from youth clubs, student blocs and public movements — we kept our sacred secret while founding Yarob: we would apply for registration, and then, if the legal procedures succeeded (which we never expected), we would start thinking of a suitable place, on condition that it be inside the camp. Worry began eating at our minds with a kind of passion, the official shape began to appear, and the conflict with many parties was at its height. It is not in those parties’ nature to see a cohesive group and imagine anything positive — at best, they start fighting it. Why? At the time we didn’t understand the real reason. We were even caught up in a small internal struggle over sharing out the administrative posts the law on charities required. And in the middle of one such external conflict, the news broke: full approval of the licence and registration. We didn’t believe it until we held the registration certificate in our hands — and even then we didn’t believe it. Seven times we asked the official handing it over the same question: “So that’s it? Anything else left?” Each time he answered: “Just form a preparatory committee and find a headquarters.” That was when we understood the real meaning of the popular saying: the Eid moon has been sighted.
How could we turn our wild ideas into programs on the ground?
These young people took on community development for children — the most important group through which we can build the future. They worked to give children a safe environment that shapes their character, discovers their talents and gives them the life skills to deal with the world around them.
Yarob worked with boys and girls aged ten to fourteen, and in its second year with children aged six to nine.
And because we believe the future will be built by their hands, and that it is our human, religious and national duty to care for them — by providing a safe space that protects them from the risks around them, developing their intellectual, human and social skills, and empowering them in social and practical life to the highest standards — Yarob, eight years after its founding, has become a place where a child feels the deepest sense of safety the moment they step in. All of this is summed up in Yarob’s mission: to raise an aware generation with a sense of belonging, able to develop itself and its community.
Component two: Youth leadership
Why young people? It is a naive question… we would be embarrassed to write long pages answering it; the answer lies in each of our hearts. But we will answer another question: what happened to these young people?
Everyone in the group had been wronged, individually and together, on the charge of being too young. That charge became the solution — like the prophet who curses the idols, commits the “crime” of thinking, practises the “vice” of solving problems and improving the work. We were all stoned for the “sin” of technical excellence in training and activity design. We would be lying if we said we took over management reluctantly for lack of older or experienced candidates. Taking over was our firm answer to ourselves: we are the children of our own experience — we will either be, or be. And what is the point of our existence if we don’t learn and take the initiative?
We must admit our make-up was rather complex. At that time it was not easy for anyone to come in among us and blend in, especially in our circle of thinking.
So we embraced, as an unchangeable principle, youth leadership — a concept that wasn’t widespread then. Some international organisations had begun promoting it, but we were shaped by our own experience and by many earlier youth experiences, like the young people who founded the Naour Camp, and many national and international examples of young people’s role.
From then until today, Yarob has been led by a group of aware young people, cultured in the true sense of the word — the kind who disturb the public scene and make it smile when it sees change. None of us was over 25. Each of us was a child of our experience, of a cause we believed in and worked for. We went beyond classic concepts, engaged steadily with our nation’s firm principles, renewed many concepts and ideas, created our own, and began as if drawing our dreams. We were ready for this stage thanks to the many tools and abilities our varied experiences had given us — until we had a place where we could use them and express our existence: a young existence, dedicated to children.
This component produced dozens of young leaders who went through the election of seven successive boards over eight years. It was the critical point of the whole work — the hardest test and the most demanding, pressured arena.
The events and conflicts in Yarob’s administrative life would make good material for a drama series about the psychological transformations of the human character. It could inspire writers and poets, or describe a great war “to end all wars” inside a single person’s head. It is the best material Dostoevsky could have rewritten his literature on.
The scale of achievement compared with the means is central to Yarob’s youth-leadership story. Yarob began in the negative. Our first decision was to be in a headquarters in the middle of the camp: 180 square metres over two floors. A harsh joke sums up the building: for the first two years we said, “Fixing the building needs a lightning war.” Later we said, “It needs a long people’s war.” After four years of toil and effort that words can’t do justice to, two opportunities came to us in a single month:
Renovation of the building as a prize worth 40,000 euros, and ownership of the building. The first gift came from Cost Scope, which named us the best organisation in the capital governorate in one of the projects we helped deliver; the second came from a generous donor who did not want to be named. These two gifts were a happy ending to the building’s tragedy and the burden it placed on our administrative and program thinking. In many moments we lost faith in ourselves because of the building — and even more often, we insisted on staying in the camp.
On another front, keeping the board coordinated took exceptional effort across many dimensions: harmony, the ability to serve the work’s interests, commitment to Yarob’s moral considerations, the social dimension in the camp, experience in youth work, the wider social dimension, the youth-work dimension, and the ability to leave a real mark. These scales often pulled in opposite directions. It was not easy for a group of young people to build internal channels of dialogue that respected opinions and handled outside pressure (social, official, human resources, beneficiaries and more). Most of our conflicts pushed us to find a new philosophy about a concept, an event or an idea — we made philosophy out of the stuff of dreams and fed it with our youthful effort. We can’t deny that this administrative test really did eat into our youth — willingly, proudly and gratefully. Belief in the value of the work ruled every situation. We tried never to vote, and to let no decision pass without the consent of the whole board — which at one stage made it seem as if each board member had a “veto”, so to speak, bringing us back to a square somewhere between ‘against voting’ and ‘against the veto’. Not to mention the differences that were always the bright mosaic enriching all of Yarob’s work.
The alignments and divergences among board members across the seven boards usually looked like this:
The youth-work current – the camp’s sons current – the international organisations current – the moral idealism current – the arts current – the extreme pragmatism current… etc.
This is our closest attempt to show where administrative thinking and decision-making came from. It is perfectly normal to find one board member in every current, since the position depends on the topic under debate. It is a way of declaring that there were very different, even distant, cultural, social, academic and professional backgrounds — which Yarob melted into one cohesive youth leadership, fusing all the differences and putting them to work to produce a united Yarob, distinguished by the different ways its board members think.
Yarob’s presidency was always heavy. We literally urged it on one another. We would cleverly arrange to pin it on whoever we thought suitable, agreeing among ourselves without the next president — the target of the plan — knowing. Then we would go to them in a surreal, usually comic scene, as if the person we were persuading to become president were resisting a prison sentence or a military decree sending them to the trenches of the First World War. No one ever refused once the group agreed they were the person for the moment.
The pressures we faced in our administrative experience could be the main characters of a Tolstoy novel… or an Agatha Christie. Sometimes our personal circumstances (money, studies, family) crushed us all at once — teaching us a funny truth: misfortunes don’t come singly, they come as a downpour. At other times came the pressure of the challenge and our sense of responsibility to the children and parents on one side, and to friends, donors and competitors on the other — plus fighting rumours (one of the most nerve-racking pressures), and pressure over money and people. We even questioned our clothes, our looks, our words and what we posted on social media. None of this happened in an angelic or rosy setting — it was hard, made harder because these boards had good personal relationships; their working relationship had grown into a brotherly one, which made accountability harder… and the work smoother.
Administrative life at Yarob was never ideal. It was like the sea: it can sum up the science of beauty, or rage and smash every meaning of beauty. That is the picture — somewhere between the two.
All the critical days and mistakes lost their weight when we aspired this way… and we saw key positions in the political life of several countries begin empowering young people from the very top of the state — like the role of Jordan’s Crown Prince, HRH Prince Hussein bin Abdullah II, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Yes… we felt the world was reinforcing our youth leadership as we reinforced it for the world. It felt like ideas winning.
Component three: Aid
The whole question of aid was part of our vision for working with children. We designed aid to suit our society and our civilisational roots — not to commodify poverty or market people’s need. This produced a key idea that is always present when we talk about aid: we empower children mentally, emotionally and culturally… but a child will not respond to culture if we don’t respond to their family’s material needs. We see aid as a support for continued learning and a dignified life — not a tool that turns people lazy or dependent.
From here came the idea of the Emergency Cash Fund, which supports any child in any material need they or their family face, provided the problem affects the family’s social, psychological, educational or legal wellbeing. It was the first fund in this broad, many-branched program.
From another angle, traditional aid work includes a branch that sponsors orphans with a monthly sum. Yarob added to this standard picture: it covers orphans and adds other cases equivalent to orphanhood — families unable to earn a living, such as a family whose breadwinner is paralysed, or whose breadwinner is missing without official recognition.
The jewel of Yarob’s aid is a distinctive idea born of Yarob’s particular understanding of our Arab people and the needs of poor groups in the Jordanian context: the Emergency Health Aid Fund. Its staff work day and night to raise donations case by case, and it serves anyone who knocks on Yarob’s door anywhere in the Kingdom. To make the idea clearer, it rests mainly on the faz’a — the Arab rallying to help — not in its wrong sense but in its authentic Arab meaning: everyone rising for one, the group joining hands for an individual. It is our Arab culture on which the fund was built, and it has treated many cases, of every nationality living in Jordan.
Building on all this, the Royal Hashemite Court generously granted Yarob an interest-free revolving loan fund to lend people in Al-Nasr Camp working loans for small businesses to improve their economic situation, with very long repayment periods. Yarob used this to improve these families’ lives by training them in their work and its financial and technical management.
And because Yarob is a child of its environment and the culture of its young people, it recently created a fund to support students — at secondary school, university or postgraduate level — through interest-free loans repaid over reasonable periods.
These tools are the main components of Yarob’s vision: some serve children directly, some serve their families, some serve the people of Al-Nasr Camp in general, and some serve the whole Kingdom.
This vision and its components did not come from nowhere, from imitating anyone, or from random guesses. They came from Yarob’s effort to wrap around the child’s whole environment. Alongside the program foundations that build and care for the child mentally, emotionally and culturally, aid supports their basic needs (emergency cash); if their family hits a financial shortfall, the fund supports them too; if the breadwinner can’t provide, the Sponsorship Fund steps in; if anyone in the family faces a health crisis, the Emergency Health Fund covers it; if the breadwinner wants to work and earn more, the Revolving Loan Fund may help; and if the child needs to continue at school or university, the Student Fund is there as well.
Putting these ideas into practice did not happen overnight. It took much time, maturity, experience, questioning, trial and evaluation. But it also gives this group a meaning like no other — a layered meaning of winning the challenge, taking responsibility, sincerity, love, solidarity and cooperation. It is a vivid expression of faith.
Component four: Distinctive models
The difference society — and children especially — need is a unique imprint built on a clear understanding of strengths and weaknesses, on sincerity and love, and on an overriding sense of responsibility. That necessarily led to distinctive models for working with children, and so with young people.
Yarob began to shine by creating distinctive models of work with children through summer and winter camps. The art is not in holding a camp, but in the exceptional result you can achieve with such a project.
Yarob had several people well versed in camps long before Yarob — since childhood. They are one of Yarob’s hidden strengths: part of its young management were once children in youth work, at the Prince Hassan Quarter Club, Al-Awda Club or Al-Mahatta Club. Each had taken part in more than ten camps in their life, which created a strong urge to renew the way camps are run — not through ‘creativity’ in its shallow sense, but through three key elements:
Linking the program context to the camp
A sharp vision for using camp tools and inventing new ones
Burning passion.
From here Yarob held several camps, naming them after songs by the committed Syrian singer Samih Shkeir, and from day one it adopted this rule:
No camp is repeated; there is no standard annual camp. A camp is an act of devotion, not a habit — not a fixed date, a fixed format and a repeated result.
Yarob also excelled at creating group games for children and inventing group activities — fun, sporting, artistic, cultural and educational — that stimulate different intelligences and quick wit.
At the start, many “old” organisations doubted Yarob’s management ability. A unique proof bearing a firm Yarob imprint was needed. That led us to think up, and then carry out, a year-long competition across the Kingdom’s camps called the Talent Intifada Competition. Many youth-work committees and associations took part, and first prize went to four children from Talbiyeh Camp.
In its first Ramadan, Yarob hosted dozens of delegations of children from most youth-work committees and associations at Ramadan tables inside its headquarters, to bring the camps’ children closer together — the ‘A Homeland in Salt’ project.
Creativity at Yarob shines in crises. During COVID-19 the situation was extremely hard, under the Defence Law. Our challenge was to fulfil our duties and responsibilities to Yarob’s children and families in a unique way. Yarob created a new model of work with children: programs moved from the field to social media. First we designed a plan suitable for every age and group following Yarob’s Facebook page, starting with cultural and literary competitions for our children, with incentive prizes. On health, Yarob created a special health-awareness program to give families the information they needed to protect themselves from the coronavirus.
Yarob developed a new model of its Child Protection program (Rakem) in response to the global situation. The methods and programs suited to that period were as follows:
Yarob introduced a cultural program on Zoom to develop children’s skills and keep them busy with meaningful work during all that free time. A second, literary program aimed to strengthen their Arabic. The difference came from near-weekly competitions that pushed children to focus and follow the daily programs. The biggest and hardest role fell to the mentors: each had to follow the child in the programs and follow up on families’ financial situation given the circumstances. Thank God, we were able to fulfil our social and national duty to the families.
The Media Club model: because Yarob relies mainly on its own children, and believes in its duty to empower them through skills they love, it designed the Young Journalist program to build journalism and media skills among children interested in media, so they could help tell the story. A group of children learned media skills and were enabled to work in Yarob’s media; given a space to deliver, they excelled. As you read this story, dear reader, Yarob’s media is run by graduates of the Media Club.
The Children’s Parliament model: in response to the boys’ creativity in Yarob’s programs in 2019, Yarob launched the Yarob Children’s Parliament to build skills in dialogue, discussion, debate, advocacy, public speaking, campaigning, fair competition and the spirit of challenge — and so shape character. All the children were asked to form electoral blocs, and a fierce but fair competition began. The children worked almost round the clock in the Association’s building; every visitor who knocked on Yarob’s door saw at least one or two blocs at work. Influential staff had to stay neutral — first so the elections would be fair, and second because every bloc was so strong. Staff were constantly torn: every day brought an idea from one list, an initiative from another and something creative from a third. The election committee watched the lists closely; in one case it dissolved a list because its members treated each other badly, and asked them to form a new one with different members. For thirty days Yarob saw its most competitive atmosphere ever. Then the long-awaited day came: everyone working at Yarob, every friend and even followers on social media waited in an atmosphere of Yarob romance. Every voter who came in wore a winner’s smile, seeing in today’s children the leaders of tomorrow, imagining Yarob’s mission carried out to the letter. Yarob’s democratic process began… Yarob’s family, friends and supporters all voted, and the list with the most votes won — a day that showed all of Yarob’s beauty and ideals.
The Al-Bawasil model: the program was designed to get past the psychological impact of COVID-19 and to shape the leadership of the staff running it, through a creative format, free in movement and content, built on what the children wanted, with decentralised leadership that let leaders move flexibly in planning and delivery. The children chose the following topics, in specialised teams built on learning by doing in the field:
Community tourism, Microsoft Office skills, community service, presentation skills, human rights, content creation
Yarob used a new way of learning — learning by experience and practice. The project started with intensive training for team leaders to prepare them to plan their ideas. Some leaders swapped their idea because it didn’t fit; others found it hard to plan, deliver and take responsibility for a whole idea — but their will and endless passion saw them through.
The ideas took shape as follows:
The Rights-Aware Team: trains participating children in their rights and duties in society and gives them skills to influence it
The Content Creation Team: trains children to create meaningful content and counter the shallow content flooding social media — they practised both video and written content
The Technology Team: trains children in Microsoft software and how to use a computer properly
The Community Tourism Team: trains children in storytelling, research and field documentation
The Presentation Team: trains children to present any idea creatively
The Community Service Team: trains children to plan and carry out an initiative.
Al-Bawasil took place in many locations: the Community Tourism team did its field research at Ajloun Castle and Umm Qais; the Community Service team ran several initiatives at the Clothes Bank; the Rights-Aware team held several dialogue sessions at the School Parliament. As usual, it was one of Yarob’s unique experiences — it left its mark on the team leaders even before the participants, and gave experience to everyone who worked on it.
Component five: Early self-sustainability
Continuity was a nightmare for every active group back then — and perhaps in every age. It isn’t easy to gather people who can merge into a group united by an idea, bound by rules, and paying a volunteer’s price for its mental and field work. So from the very beginning we had to be extremely careful to design mechanisms that would sustain Yarob — and in truth we started before Yarob existed.
There is no exact moment when the idea of feeding the work with staff from the children it graduates began, because it already existed in youth work in some form: a child is a ‘fata’ (youth member) until adolescence, then becomes an assistant — a stage known as pre-mentoring and pre-supervision. For us, though, it was not simply a safe path from youth member to the pre-mentoring (assistant) stage. We were also influenced by many models that prepare their own human resources within a strategic vision of their goals and available people. We can say that this component — early self-sustainability — was on our minds even before Yarob began.
We had an important question: is this an idea separate from Yarob? An idea that serves Yarob? Or an idea born for Yarob? The work gave the answer.
We started the idea in October 2014 with what was called the Elite Program, at one of the organisations where we volunteered. We tried giving adolescents aged 11–14 a set of challenging subjects they don’t get at school or in centres, and teaching them how to put these to work for noble goals. Our starting point was to plant ambition in them, so they would look forward seriously and eagerly to becoming leaders (staff). We always said: today you are the target group, tomorrow our colleagues; today we give to you, tomorrow we give together; today you are adolescents, tomorrow we are all leaders.
This new, innovative program then gave birth to a bold, creative mechanism: the Support Team, in February 2015 (a month before we agreed to found Yarob). It was made up of ten children who had excelled in the Elite Program. Their job was to learn by doing and by working alongside: practising what they had learned in the Elite Program and working next to the staff in thinking and delivery. It threw the door wide open, pushing the whole group forward, pleased with what they saw and hopeful about what was to come.
If we look closely at how Yarob began, we find this component’s result in what we wrote: “As soon as the youth group met, they named themselves the Founding Body; the group of ten children followed with their own meeting and named themselves the Support Team.” These children helped found Yarob with real merit and courage.
When we started work at Yarob we naturally began thinking about continuing this component, and launched the Cultured Child project under the name Al-Huras, bringing together those ten children and anyone else who wanted to join, from October 2015 to August 2016. We did it again with the second edition of Al-Huras from September 2016 to December 2017. Then it paused for a full year because of administrative and financial burdens that left us unable to run such intensive work — and to give its graduates time to rely more on field experience outside Yarob. During 2018 our achievements in the project became clear: it turns participants’ ordinary will into a burning will to become staff and leaders. That year the idea looked like a program that could sort what works from what doesn’t, and it began to look like a possible methodology. We did it again with the third edition of the ‘Al-Huras idea’ as the Ashri’a (Sails) project, and even during COVID we worked on the fourth edition. By early 2023, after seven years, the results were:
The Al-Huras idea graduated 36 young men and women from beneficiaries to contributors (leaders)
Four cohorts worked through four projects between 2014 and 2021
The fifth edition is now under way (each cohort needs 18 months of training)
The quiet, powerful factor in the idea’s progress: they grow up as time goes by
These graduates have taken on all kinds of roles at Yarob — from supporting logistics, to supporting social counselling, then mentoring, training, facilitation and coordination, and on to leadership and project management. By early 2022, more than 50% of Yarob’s volunteers (over half of the active roles) were held by Al-Huras graduates, in every area — on the board as well as in the field and programs.
These graduates contributed to joint work and were the spearhead in making many working partnerships succeed and building individual and institutional relationships.
Wherever they went they had a strong impact, with enough influence to leave a good mark — serving children, engaging with the camp community and their schools, and even with national and international organisations and UNRWA. They were truly our ambassadors. As a result we never had to talk about our success — our success spoke for us.
This experience produced a working methodology, extended through trial and built on evaluation, impact measurement, caring for graduates and continuing to influence and learn from them: the Al-Huras Leadership Preparation Methodology for ages 14–17.
It also produced a methodology built on how much this component shapes young people’s thinking and behaviour, and so their personalities and mindsets — redesigned to serve any youth group, formal or informal: the Al-Huras Youth Leadership Methodology for ages 18–25.
The administrative and technical experience of these achievements gave birth to Yarob’s twin: Al-Huras Foundation for Sustainable Community Development. It takes on documenting Yarob’s experience and spreading this model, with all its components, in a decentralised way, at the request of any youth group seeking to build something social or cultural — and completes the parts Yarob does not cover because of its legal limits.
This experience has kept — and still keeps — its sincerity of intention and has drawn as many people as possible into our values. It has renewed and innovated, and is a source of pride and a main reason many staff are still with the work today.
Component six: Participation and openness
It took a good while. We spent the first two years in a kind of shell — the shell of a group of “young” people and children focused on one thing only: the epic of existing, and holding on to existence. Truly, in the first year it felt like an epic… and after every epic, holding firm. So a deep, urgent need arose to break this shell, which could soon become a tragic closing-in: closed thinking, closed programs, closed management, closed off from people. We could turn into a closed bloc that no achievement or work could help.
In those first two years we were very good at attracting staff, expertise and people eager to learn — a strategic opening for two things: not closing in completely, and renewing our administrative and program thinking. But clearly we became saturated with human resources who needed new work and bold extensions — to get things done with the right numbers, and because they deserved meaningful Yarob experiences. So we began expanding our external relationships and weaving partnerships, which usually ensured, one way or another, that Yarob was giving rather than taking resources.
We had many fears. Yarob was, as one ill-wisher put it, “a mature, influential youth reservoir”, and many wanted partnerships to benefit from it rather than for mutual benefit — it seems the imperialist colonial mindset can, sadly, operate at the institutional level too. So in many small experiences we withdrew or went around things to avoid a situation on the ground where Yarob was drained for nothing.
On the other hand, there was a drive rooted in the culture this group carries: that it is our duty to support any social, institutional or grassroots work, especially youth work. We felt we had to help many, even if it drained us in some way. These ideas came under the heading ‘the same trench’: everyone at Yarob firmly believed Yarob was exceptional and should stand with anyone who asked — especially as young people who had lived the bitterness of refuge and the helplessness of facing our society’s and nation’s issues. It gave us a real sense of responsibility, not based on superiority, or big and small, or strong and weak… it all came down to closing ranks to face what threatens our work or what helps us achieve it.
That feeling did not save us from a sense that a negative shell was forming. We were forced to take serious steps towards openness and participation — alongside clear calls and guidance from the United Nations that reinforced what we were already practising in participation, which gave us confidence in our steps.
Successive boards opened many doors for cooperation and partnership, leading to projects such as:
The Languages project (English/German/French/Spanish) – Al-Nasr Camp – Yarob’s children
The Child Protection project – Gaza Camp – Gaza Camp’s children
The children’s Summer Club project – Al-Hanouneh Society for Popular Culture – Yarob and Al-Hanouneh children
A summer camp to promote boycott culture – BDS Jordan – children from many places
The Library project – Sama Gaza Foundation, 2020
The Al-Sadeeq project – Cost Scope
Art therapy through drawing for victims of the Syrian crisis – SOS Children’s Villages
Supporting Tkiyet Um Ali in distributing food parcels to beneficiaries in Al-Nasr
The Bilad Al-Sham Heritage project – Turquoise Mountain – Al-Nasr Camp children
The Nay Making project – Beit Al-Nay Foundation – Al-Nasr Camp children
The Masahat project – Yarob staff – Habaq
The Camp Ambassador project – Habaq
The Fares project – Habaq
The English Language project – Yarob’s children – Arab Women Leaders Union
The Third Bank project – Yarob staff
Component seven: Art and children
Using art with children is nothing new in social work in general or in youth work in particular, but we focused on what makes art fundamentally different. Through the performing arts especially — theatre and drama, choir and committed song, folk dabke, public speaking and reciting poetry and prose — we could make an exceptional difference in children’s lives. In Rakem and Masha’el we build the basic environment for children’s emotional, mental, social and intellectual progress; but art holds many treasures and secrets that can touch each person individually and collectively. Theatre, for example, can free people from their complexes or mental stress, and carry many social and national messages in ways that are both emotional and rational. We also cannot leave out the main reason we turned to the performing arts: they are strategic tools for expressing the national condition, preserving Palestinian heritage and portraying the Palestinian diaspora — something we see as a condition today and as heritage in the future, expressing Palestinians in the face of the Zionist occupation’s threat to their identity, heritage and very existence — in a way that does not conflict with, and indeed strengthens, belonging to Jordan and the Arab world. Art, as we see it, is the most deeply rooted path in the collective and individual conscience for better mental health, for keeping the national spirit alive and for sustaining the human conscience. In practice, it is the space where we test the influence of mentors and supervisors on children, and see what each child needs to adjust behaviour, deepen culture and shape character — all through art.
These ideas took real form in a major play staged in 2017, crowning the training efforts of the Child Protection program – Rakem. Eng. Nawras Al-Rimawi (one of the most prominent youth-work leaders from Zarqa Camp) suggested staging a play based on a story by Mr. Adnan Al-Rimawi, and we proposed doing it in the Rahbani style (committed song, poetry, dabke and drama combined). Those discussions and efforts produced a play with 66 boys and girls from Al-Nasr Camp and a group of actors (the children’s trainers): “A Handful of Village Soil”, directed by Eng. Nawras Al-Rimawi. It was performed five times — at Al-Balqa Applied University, in Al-Nasr, Irbid and Zarqa camps and in the city of Zarqa — in 2017 and 2018.
This experience was Yarob’s main inspiration for designing a separate program, apart from the programs aimed at child protection and a safe environment. We also began to widen the nature of our work and lay solid foundations for working with children. It earned the trust of many circles: Yarob overcame its big trial of having such a young board, went beyond everyone who doubted its competence, and showed its strength, toughness, cohesion and — most importantly — its honesty with itself and with the public.
So from the second half of 2018 the arts emerged as an independent program called Thurayya. Its first edition ran from September to December 2018, with Yarob working on theatre, public speaking, choir and dabke.
As mentioned under the participation component, many organisations and partners helped produce this kind of program — Al-Hanouneh Society for Popular Culture, Crescendo Music Institute and Beit Al-Nay Foundation — and Yarob ran the second edition of Thurayya in 2019. The arts expanded to many topics, such as drawing with Ms. Tamam Al-Akhal, and sport opened up within Thurayya too: Greco-Roman wrestling, football, basketball, kickboxing and swimming. It was an artistic and sporting peak alongside Yarob’s core work with children, and activities peaked when Yarob’s folk dabke team took on the Shoman Award challenge — and after great effort won first place in 2019.
Often we can hardly believe so much was achieved at such a pace. It wasn’t genius on our part — it was truly a mighty wave of children’s, adolescents’ and young people’s desire, a wave no one could split and no pebble could get between. This was never a group relying on its cleverness alone; it always relied on surging waves of will that crash against every impossibility.
Component eight: Adaptive management
Speaking of cleverness, Yarob’s story must include an important chapter on its skill at tactics and quick moves — usually plain for all to see, and both trusted and debated by those interested and by the public.
It is as simple as this: a group of young people volunteering in a place they built from nothing, with no greater priority in their lives. They have enough experience of failure and success to handle situations in ways that protect the work, develop its tools and help it grow and spread. Add one simple but essential fact: they do this work because they are trying to change things for the better. They are children of the Palestinian diaspora, surrounded by a clear sense of patriotism — not slogan patriotism, but their need for a homeland: a homeland they see in poetry, feeling and memory, and feel they must regain — relying first on Jordan, the homeland: not an alternative homeland, but a homeland that enables us to regain an occupied one.
Here lay the heart of adaptive management: we had enough noble and realistic motives to manage the struggle.
We used to call these abilities ‘tactical management’, but since we need words everyone in the field understands, we call it here ‘adaptive management’. We don’t work with the mindset of someone who has reached certainty and wants to dictate it to the target group, nor with the empty mindset that sees no social, human, intellectual or cultural need and takes all its content from the global agendas of organisations and others. We truly believe the work must centre on society itself, and we reject Western centrality or dependency, or importing a culture or cause unrelated to our social context. If children’s schooling reality leads to weak learning, poor language or poor teaching, we adapted and created non-formal teaching projects (not like school), built on children’s acceptance of us and our ability to reach young people who study these subjects creatively — and the results have been amazing year after year.
When the youth group needed to keep up with developments in social work in Jordan and worldwide, we held an intensive training-of-trainers course of over sixty hours with the most skilled young specialists in the field, plus many courses in facilitation, counselling and more.
When the challenge was volunteers’ ability versus their desire — at many stages we gathered volunteers full of eagerness who lacked what they needed to do their mentoring or training well — we held staff preparation courses over the years to give them the tools, theory and practical techniques.
On the administrative and financial side, the boards played the key role in avoiding financial and legal obstacles and handling internal crises and external tensions well.
As for COVID, we have plenty of stories of adaptive management. Lockdowns came with the pandemic, and with them an unprecedented break in contact. Yarob’s people were used to constant contact, without a break, through four years of tireless work — and suddenly there was silence. So we decided to create a youth dialogue project — the first of its kind: youth work for the sake of youth work itself, not to prepare young people to work with children. We called it the Balestia Youth Dialogue project. It used online tools to hold dialogue activities and discussion, literary and science salons based on learning from others’ experiences, to encourage openness and keep dialogue and contact going within the team and with our partners.
Management during COVID was “crazy”, as some put it. The group faced two options: withdraw and freeze all work until things became clear — or the second option: “Retreat? Hell!”, as the American general said in the First World War, a decision that helped tip the war at the time. Naturally, we decided to say: Retreat? Hell!
And so Yarob rose and never sat down — while, sadly, almost everyone else sat down and most did not rise. We say ‘sadly’ because it is truly sad that Yarob alone carried so many efforts it is proud and honoured to have made, yet was badly drained by the empty field around it, which weighed it down. Still it carried on. The group of more than 75 volunteers divided the roles among themselves, and we formed a Food Security team, a Programs team and a Media team.
The Programs team kept the regular programs going remotely through Facebook and WhatsApp with ‘Rakem at a distance’, continuing on screen with the same topics and plan, in public. But the activity didn’t really work, so it moved to remote competitions in which each child did several self-led activities that met that year’s program goals. This approach didn’t last long either, though it worked to a degree, depending on how far we could influence the children. Finally, six months into the pandemic, the Programs team did something that could fairly be called suicidal: it designed a legal, safety-compliant schedule of face-to-face activity, which took enormous effort to plan. Thank God, Yarob has enough passionate, devoted people for the work. Rakem — which had run 4 hours a week for 150 children — was redesigned into 40 hours a week for 80 children. The eighty came in four sessions a day, each day with a supervisor or trainer running 4 repeated sessions of 20 boys or girls; so each child came 5 times a week and got two hours of focused activity each time. It was adaptive management powered by desire and will.
The Food Security team mobilised all of Yarob’s resources for rapid fundraising campaigns to support any of our children’s families, any family living on day labour, or any family anywhere in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan that knocked on our door. It was a focused overturning of reality: young arms put up a remarkable fight against poverty and were the best support for people and society.
Component nine: Team spirit
From collective achievement to popular adoption: the group worked to have society adopt the idea of Yarob, so its funding came to rely on grassroots social networks that supported the work regularly, from one dinar to a thousand. Here the team spirit shone. Someone once told us: “Community-based funding isn’t sustainable.” Our practical answer: a mission adopted by the people never dies, because the people are sustainable by nature. That never ignores the need for income-generating projects the Association will own in future.
And on other fronts of team spirit…
(Each of us must take off our affiliations and leanings at Yarob’s door… and walk in purely as a Yarobi, merged into the Yarob family: a true member, a generous brother or sister, who values effort and holds the one who errs to account)
(We will credit success to us… all of us… the Yarob family… just as we will own failure)
(If one of us does wrong in public, it is Yarob’s wrong, not theirs alone)
(This place rejects one-man rule, just as it rejects permanent deputies… and sacred guardians)
(No collective work can fail if the individual is truly for the group… and the group for the individual)
(The real credibility management must have — which will then show in the staff’s credibility — is its ability to hold itself to account)
(Compassion belongs first and foremost among a group like Yarob’s)
(We would rather Yarob end than let a self-serving moneyed person, or a hypocrite from within, climb on its effort)
(There is a kind of person in this work… for whom losing is a gain)
(Yarob’s connection to a civilisation, a history and cultural and intellectual roots is shown in behaviour… not in words)
(Nothing is taken for granted without an objective evaluation of results)
(Staff must be brothers and sisters in front of the children… and behind them too)
With these quotations, repeated hundreds of times in Yarob’s meetings, we begin telling the story of this solid component.
From the first year, the founders set a clear tradition: administrative work is no one’s monopoly — whether or not we were influenced by some practical models here and there, which we know are few. It is a clear, firm, indirect answer to any group that monopolises boards or governments. Everyone has the right to an experience to learn from, and every administrative role has the right to set its own requirements. With that simple logic, the founders established a principle: rotation of management. Across all the boards, no one has joined by guardianship, permanence or fixed tenure — only by merit and choice. That is one thing; members not staying long in their roles is another, which sometimes weakens the first — there is no complete expert in all of Yarob’s affairs. It is a double-edged sword.
The second tradition: no decision without legal justification and collective consent. From here came the idea of the Yarob family: everyone who considers themselves a Yarobi and plays a clear role during an annual program cycle. It goes beyond the legal concept of the general assembly: some volunteers don’t want to register in the general assembly, or are under 18, or don’t hold Jordanian citizenship — so we created a wider circle called the Yarob family.
In the Yarob family come together young and old, long-standing and new, Arab and foreign, active and supporting, board and staff, technical and leadership — forming one circle that owns success and failure, adopts a collective will, represents a collective mind, and so drives collective behaviour and shapes a collective conscience. It is the ideal every volunteer seeks to belong to. Achievement is adopted from it… because it is designed from it.
Organisations in social work were used to a certain pattern in the blessed month of Ramadan: an annual central Ramadan event to raise donations. Yarob tried this pattern twice without success, which left us, over three years, with a fierce desire to succeed in funding Yarob. So we moved the work from where it was possible to where no one else was working, from the usual way to a bold way. Management shifted funding from relying on ten people seen as major donors to ten teams of volunteers holding conversations — and labour pains — with hundreds of people. Instead of 1,000 dinars from one donor, Yarob, through its family, went for 1,000 dinars from 100 people… and this message emerged:
(At Yarob we need the people to adopt its mission… not Yarob adopting the mission of capital)
This difficult shift produced a dazzling, unmatched success. The collective mind (owning success and failure, fused into one body and one mission) became a body that focuses, strikes and achieves. The effort became easy. Funding moved off management’s shoulders onto the shoulders of those who adopted Yarob’s mission — hundreds of people, volunteers and friends of the work. The shift led to a fundraising campaign of one dinar, two, ten, twenty… We spoke to everyone, so our circles of relationships widened, catching many people’s attention and the eyes of those interested in public work. And so Yarob turned the traditional central iftar upside down: from a stiff, formal iftar attended by a few donors (who might not even give) and a handful of children and staff, to an iftar in the heart of a working-class area, in the heart of the field — at a school next to the camp — attended by all the children, all the staff, all the friends, all the staff’s families, all the children’s families, and any donors who wished. An iftar once limited to a hundred people became one with more than 1,200. It was an idea held by twenty-three people… adopted by thousands… and funded by hundreds. This is our answer to every international organisation that once told us: donations aren’t sustainable. We tell them today: if the people adopt Yarob’s mission, the people are sustainable…
Since 2018 there have been six central iftars — three of them public, one online because of COVID — returning to normal in 2022, along with dozens of rapid and medium fundraising campaigns and many official and popular award ceremonies at the end of each year. The reason for our administrative, technical, financial and popular success… is the Yarob family.
We went through all this so we can say, boldly: we don’t care whether we are first or last… what matters to us today is to open up our experience, with all its components, with an open heart to anyone who wants to work. It is not ours alone, nor a burden on us alone… What we are today is nothing but what God Almighty has given us…
It is hard to document experiences in which homeland mixes with poverty, creativity with scarcity, feeling with challenge, fear with drive, love with knowledge, passion with hardship, poetry with prose, language with purpose, imagination with logic, the camp with beauty, and faith with injustice.
So we close this story with the following poetic horizon, which may explain our experience in a poetic way — summed up in a line we see as the motto of the next stage: the journey has not begun… and the road has not ended.