First Meeting

Headquarters of MasterPeace – 6:00 – 9:30 pm

Attendees:

• Ehab Mounir

• Ramy Rostom

• Hadeer Ahmed

• Dalia Said

• Ihab Hassan

• Omnia el Dessouki

• Heba Azooz

• Amr Abu el Naga

• Sherif Alaa

• Yasmin Galal

• Ahmed Coucha

Flow of the meeting:

Part I

The meeting started by defining our emotions regarding the bombings

since letting out these emotions will help us think rationally afterwards.
Some people objected to this approach but others – including myself –
thought it was very important.

Anyways, the emotions were defined as follows: helpless, depressed,

confused, fear, shock, inability to express anything, hate against
extremism, anger, pity, devastation and disdain towards people's
unawareness.

Part II

Then the meeting proceeded with defining the main problem and its
causes. The main problem was "Unawareness and Intolerance". The
causes for such a problem are many, we have defined the following:

• Extremist Satellite Channels

• Religious Institutions

• The Government/The System

 • Education

• The Internet

• Poverty

• Parenting

• Denial that there's a problem happening in the first place

Then the discussion continued on what areas we as young people can take
part in changing, and they were: Education, Internet and Religious
Institutions.

There was consensus on Education and Internet, while as for religious

institutions there was a debate since most of the attendees stated that
they don’t have access to such institutions except Ehab Mounir who said
that he can easily work with young people serving at the church.

Education

It was agreed that it is better to build on something that already exists

than start something from scratch. There are plenty of initiatives from
NGOs that work with education, our role would be to coordinate between
them and create a platform where they can come together and discuss
issues related to education and learning values like: tolerance, team work,
accepting the other … etc. We would also act as a provider for volunteers,
we will advertise for volunteer opportunities through our circle of
acquaintances + Social Media Channels (see the coming part for details on
this point). The initiatives discussed were:

• The Alliance for Arab Women's Project in Mansheyet Nasser

to work with children, their parents and the teachers to enable the
children to take an effective role in decision making. (Contact
Person: Ramy Rostom)

• Human Rights Education Project at The Egyptian Association

for Community Participation Enhancement (Contact Person: Sherif
Alaa)

• EduAccess, a British Council funded Project (in partnership

with AYB) that aims at carrying out workshops in Ezbet Abu Arn
with children in preparatory schools to teach them values through
art, teach them about the environment, hygiene and English
(Contact Person: Yasmin Galal)

• Namaa, works with sustainable development (Contact Person:

Dalia Said)
 • Student Activities like: ALMUN, AIESEC, EU – encourage them
to adopt the aforementioned values in their social/human rights
council. We can even help them with material or delivery. (Contact
Person: Yasmin Galal, Sherif Alaa)

• Cultural Centers like: Cervantes … etc (Contact Person: Ramy

Rostom)

• Injaz, an NGO that works with Social Entrepreneurship and

Education and is actually now currently looking for volunteers to
work with children in El Marg and El Salam areas. (Contact Person:
Yasmin Galal)

Media, Internet and Social Media Channels

The main two ideas revolve around two things:

1. A Magazine

The magazine will target children; the main character will be an

Egyptian superhero who will basically have the values that we want to
teach the children and demonstrate them. What we need to make this
magazine a reality: volunteer caricature artists, a team responsible for
the content and a publisher house and/or a sponsor

2. A Facebook Page

Through the facebook page we will share the announcements for

volunteer opportunities, open up discussions, shoot videos with
different people and upload them, share awareness about satellite
channels (which are spreading wrong messages and how to counter
them

Important Note

We also want to get corporates on board. We need to involve them in

different activities whether by funds, expertise or teaching their staff.
There will also be a team for proposal writing to target CSR and HR
departments in corporates.

What's next?

1. Send me any updates if you have.

2. Tell me if you are interested to be involved, what do you want to work

with? (I personally will be working on the Educational Platform, so we still
need volunteers for the social media, the magazine and the proposal
writing).

3. Next meeting should be scheduled this week so that we can divide

who's responsible for what, and each responsible person will recruit
her/his own team and report to one person (me or anyone else we agree
upon). The venue can remain the same, you just need to reply to me with
the dates that suit you this week for the meeting and we will go with the
majority (I suggest Tuesday or Wednesday).