Zikra for Popular Learning

Raised in Amman in 1980, Rabee witnessed the transformation of his urban neighbourhood from a place surrounded with wheat farms & spaces where children play and shepherds graze cattle to a ‘modern’ place suffocated by cement buildings and huge malls. Growing up, this experience shaped Rabee’s perspective and understanding of what has been lost of his identity and relationship to place and people.

Rabee began his career in marketing & advertising, and worked for entities such as Toyota and The Children’s Museum, while he was also exploring the riches of many villages in the rural part of Jordan. These villages were a great learning source for Rabee and he was able to reconnect with knowledge and wisdom that were not part of his urban city life, this experience inspired Rabee to conduct “village experiences”, a tourism program for city dwellers that reconnects them with their land, identity and culture. 

Since 2007 Rabee has been working closely with different communities in Jordan to rediscover their local knowledge and how these forms of knowledge can inspire sustainable solutions to many challenges.

People in the region were able to lead sustainable forms of life where they grow their food, share resources, rely on the land to weave clothes & build their houses. Today, in urban cities like Amman, these forms of knowledge and economic systems are erased and replaced with new systems built to fit the structures of capitalism and mono-culture.

Through his project, Rabee created economic projects and different learning programs/spaces where community members learn & engage with the rich local knowledge systems. Some of the programs are:

• -Creating a cooperative for wheat farmers in Jordan and connecting it with an alternative market.
• -Utilizing tourism to bridge both urban and rural communities and create income opportunities to farmers in villages. 

Modernism and economic globalization has led to an immense increase in the scale and power of big businesses that feed a consumer-based culture. Many communities in the global south are facing ever-growing rates of poverty, unemployment and financial instability, while the economically powerful-urban communities in these countries build structures that are shaped to fit western ways of living, from school curriculums that are disconnected from language, land and culture, to where and how decision-makers look for solutions for community’s most stressing challenges.

In Jordan, a country that imports 98% of its use of food, farmers are most affected by poverty and many significant seed species are lost. The government doesn’t support farming for local consumption neither provide subsidies for farmers, becoming more and more dependent on importing instead of supporting local production.

Rabee believes that restoring the wellbeing of the entire community starts from restoring the wellbeing of local farmers, restoring food systems & relationship to the land. The price humanity have to pay for ignoring this is vast, from alarming poverty, obesity and diabetes, collapsing health systems and destruction of the land. 

Zikra aims to re-identify communities’ relationship to their identity and cultivate local knowledge to inspire sustainable solutions to stressing challenges, Zikra created two projects:

• 1-Rural experiences:

Zikra creates tourism experiences that bridge the rich, but isolated urban community with marginalized rural community, where visitors engage with farmers, shepherds and other community members in activities such as harvesting, making cheese, learn how to build houses from sustainable materials, how to craft traditional musical instrument such as Nai, rural creative ways of reusing water and managing waste and learn traditional ways of cooking.

The program helps urban people who play a role in creating policies to learn about the struggles of farmers and agriculture. Furthermore, urban community gain the wisdom and knowledge of sustainable living. The program creates a sustainable income for the host community; each trip generates $700 that is channelled directly to 13 families.

Economic projects: Zikra also creates economic opportunities for farmers and food producers in different locations in Jordan. For example, create a new market for organic wheat farmers that eliminate the medium and link the farmers directly with restaurants and bakeries. 

Zikra consider it self a program that is impactful for all community members, as the localization of economic and food systems impacts and reform the lives of all community strata. The effect that Zikra’s programs have is multidimensional:

1. Economic Impact: On local farmers and community members in 4 villages in Jordan. In each village 13-15 families (approximately 78 members) generate income from hosting rural experiences (tourism trips), workshops such as cheese-making and selling crops, processed food or handicrafts to trip visitors or restaurants and bakeries.
2. Social Impact: People taking part in workshops and experiences build a direct relationship with farmers, it erases negative stereotype between urban and rural communities, restores farmer’s pride and eliminates the giver-receiver relationship to a more equal one where each party exchange and share knowledge and resources.  Learning Impact: The project provides a significant learning opportunity for all community members to learn about their sustainability, they learn how to grow and find food that is not affected by toxic chemicals, they learn the struggles of local farmers, they learn how to replace consumption habits with productive ones, they learn how to keep the land healthy and save water resources.

Witnessing the drastic change of Rabee’s neighborhood growing up, he was conscious about the cost and price of this change, from losing spacious areas to play and engage with neighbors, or watching shepherds grazing in the surrounding lands of his house to cutting down fruit trees to build three malls and a huge market, the only resulted in making the neighborhood crowded, polluted, unsafe for children to play or engage with nature and dividing community with concrete walls.

As he ventured to rural areas, Rabee began finding what he previously lost, seeking ways to connect with the people in a village called Ghor Al-Mazra’a, he arranged a charity drive to deliver food and used cloth, but the experience left him unsettled, he noticed that he was looking at what people lack instead of the riches he experienced, that is when he decided to start Rural experiences. As his passion for his program spread in Amman, people left their urban bubble to take part in the experience, they later arranged for their schools, companies or friends to also take part, and the project grew, that was when Rabee decided to leave his job and focus on the project.

Re-discovering the local knowledge in Jordan has enriched Rabee as a human being, restoring his pride of his identity and culture. As most city-dwellers, Rabee grew up in the city of Amman, where education, culture and ways of living are heavily reshaped to fit the structures of capitalism and mono-culture. This leaves people disconnected from themselves, their language and their larger community.

Rabee’s discovery of the knowledge and wisdom made him aware of the occupation he and the rest of the people are living under, the occupation of culture and economics, and occupation at the level of knowledge , and this is the most dangerous because its invisible and strips from people their confidence that they are able to create the change they seek without relying on external institutes.

One of the greatest driving forces for Rabee’s work is restoring people’s pride and dignity. Youths in the region are driven to believe they live in countries poor in resources and have no future. As a Marketing and Communications graduate Rabee utilized his skills to bring people’s attention to what has been concealed from the realities of their community, he utilized social media, film-making skills and creative marketing campaigns that helped grew his Rural experience project.

Rabee served at Toyota and the children’s Museum, where he learned fund-raising skills that were useful in the early stages of his work. As the project grew and as Rabee learned the significance of capitalizing on one’s resources, he remodeled the project to rely upon itself and become self-funded, the tourism and economic projects provide sustainable income for families in different areas and Rabee is able to generate his own income sharing his experience with social and youth entities and institutes that are interested in adopting a similar philosophy.

Rabee’s unique experience between corporate and social work enabled him to sustain and grew Zikra since 2007 without relying on any grants or donations. In addition, his model of work which starts from exploring the local knowledge of each community then capitalize upon it inspired many groups across the Arab region such as Oman , Yemen ,Tunisia, UAE, Saudi Arabia and more, where many young men and women established social projects inspired by the same philosophy.

One of the biggest challenges that faced Rabee was innovating a model that ensured the sustainability of the project that is not dependent on charity, sponsorship or grants, for few reasons:

-Rabee wants to prove that it is possible to create an independent model of work from utilizing available resources.

-Most funding institutes in Jordan are not ethical (they either enforce political or cultural agendas or promote products that are harmful for the environment or the health, which is against Zikra’s beliefs).

Rabee then created two arms for Zikra, the first was the arm that channels income directly to beneficiaries from different projects (such as tourism , hosting workshops such as cheese-making and farming, or selling crop directly to consumers), the second generates income to ensure his own sustainability, from providing training and consultation services to youth and entities that aspire to follow similar methodology of work.

This financial model was difficult at the beginning with very few options, it later allowed Rabee to grow and expand in ways that are not driven by availability or preferences of sponsorship or grants, rather by deep sense of purpose.   

Few years ago Rabee was recruited by MBC Hope ( a television channel that invest in making positive change in the Arab region) and an international NGO to conduct a youth camp for 40 Arab change makers. The organizers mentioned that it was their standard to conduct such camps in a 5 star hotel and a huge budget was allocated to cover the hotel expenses. As this goes against Zikra’s believes , Rabee stated to the organizers that he will only conduct the camp it was hosted in an environment that will allow participants to engage with one another, cook with each other and prepare the setup they choose.

Although the organizers refused and resisted at the beginning, they agreed after understanding what can be lost if the camp was held in a five stars hotel, from relationships to mutual experiences to having participants work with their own hands. The camp was eventually held in a youth house in a small forest that is usually utilized for sport events, the organizers went out of their ways to reshape their standards to fit the environment Rabee wanted to build for participants.