GW Hosted Four Emerging Leaders from the State Department’s Professional Fellows Program

Three George Washington University offices have spent the past five weeks hosting fellows from Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco through the U.S. State Department's Professional Fellows Program. The international knowledge exchange initiative, designed to promote mutual understanding while enhancing leadership and professional skills for young world leaders between the ages of 25-40, created an opportunity for fellows and GW staff to learn from one another.

The fellows were placed at the GW Center for Career Services, the Honey W. Nashman Center for Civic Engagement and Public Service and the Center for Excellence in Public Leadership (CEPL).

Marva Jennings, the director of Career Academic Partnerships at the Center for Career Services, said this was a special opportunity and through the weeks, the teams made meaningful connections with the fellows as they related shared challenges and new ideas.

"There is something a little bit encouraging about understanding that problems exist all around the world. We're all struggling, we're all human. And so that is a bond that is helpful to know that we're not that disconnected, even though there are borders and there's vast oceans between some of our countries," Jennings said. "I think that is the beauty. That bond is pretty powerful."

Jennings hosted Ola Samy Abdelnaby, a faculty member at Ain Shams University in Egypt, whose background is in biochemistry and nutrition. Abdelnaby spent the first decade of her career teaching nutrition and healthcare and has since focused on integrating health and well-being into career development services.

"If we ignore health care and well-being, we end up filling students with skills and knowledge while forgetting they are human," Abdelnaby said. "What I am trying to do is have a holistic approach, so we're encouraging students to be well-balanced humans with the ability to understand what they want to do, how to do it."

Abdelnaby said she was eager to work with the Career Center because of its efforts to incorporate wellness into programming. She hopes to adapt what she learned into a broader model that could be applied at universities and workplaces around the world.

At the Nashman Center, Siwar Ben Hamed from Tunisia, a project coordinator for the French Office for Immigration and Integration, focused on connecting community engagement with employability skills. She wanted to leave GW with ideas for strengthening civic engagement programs and tying them with employment skills in Tunisia.

While at the Nashman Center, Ben Hamed observed community engagement programs like GW Math Matters, where students offer tutoring in D.C. public schools.

From the surveys of the GW students who volunteered as tutors, she saw they learned important skills that can be transferable to many career fields.

"One of the skills that you learn when you're tutoring is empathy, communication, problem solving," Ben Hamed said. "Those are important skills that you can always put into light when you have an interview, when you have an internship, or wherever you work."

Ben Hamed is now developing a toolkit to help students and young people translate civic and community engagement experiences into workforce skills that can help them stand out while looking for jobs and internships.

Also working at the Nashman Center was Hayat El Asri, a professor of information systems and analytics at Al Akhawayn University in Morocco.

She focused on studying how universities measure the impact of their civic engagement programs and explored ways to support young people who are without employment, education or training opportunities.

Al Akhawayn University already has a culture of civic engagement where students are required to complete community service and service-learning projects before graduating. But since many professors run these initiatives independently, her goal is to create a more organized and connected approach to community engagement across the university.

Being at the Nashman Center also inspired El Asri to pursue the development of a student-led hub where university students could teach artificial intelligence (AI), career readiness and professional skills to young people in underserved areas, helping improve their employment opportunities.

Amy Cohen, the assistant vice provost and executive director of the Nashman Center, said hosting international fellows gave her team the chance to step back, reflect on their own work and see it through a new lens.

"I think at the very baseline, it gives us an opportunity to talk about what we do and see it through new eyes," Cohen said. "We learn about our own work as we explain it and as we learn how colleagues in other countries are doing similar work."

Mostafa Ahmed, the chief partnerships officer at Athar Accelerator, an organization that supports entrepreneurs in Egypt, spent his fellowship at CEPL working on a partnerships and fundraising strategy.

Ahmed said his previous work has largely focused on private-sector partnerships and grants, and the fellowship gave him new insight into building relationships with government partners.

"Seeing all the proposals and the programs that they are delivering to many governmental entities has been an eye-opening experience for me," Ahmed said. "I learned a lot from this model."

The experience also inspired him to explore new ways of creating tailored programs and partnerships for public-sector organizations when he returns to his role at Athar.

Rachel Mahmud, the administrative director at CEPL, said Ahmed joined at a pivotal moment. Recent economic circumstances have forced the center to rethink how it supports its programs and pursue new partnership and fundraising strategies.

She said Ahmed's background in the private sector and nonprofit space brought a fresh perspective as they work to implement their new strategic plan.

"We were really excited to have Mostafa come in and bring a fresh perspective, since he has a private sector background, and he's also done a lot of work in the NGO space," Mahmud said.

Outside of the projects they worked on, the fellows also made time to explore the city and ended up building friendships they know will continue well beyond the program.

"We've all been saying, it is not the last time we'll be working together, and we'd be taking this far more than the planned time because it's been absolutely amazing," El Asri said

The fellows said they enjoyed taking in all GW had to offer, including attending events such as the New Venture Competition and NEXT Festival, and found the community welcoming.

Katherine Norton, director of Career Learning and Experiences, said this experience has really highlighted the importance of making these international connections and that having another set of eyes on GW's services can foster new ideas.

"These exchanges," Norton said, "are a very rich part of our own growth."