Living Entrepreneurship Blog / Global & Multicultural

Latest Blog from Al Tareeq – The Path

Al-Tareeq is an organization that implements summer entrepreneurship courses for ambitious high school students in the Levant by offering ann original curriculum based on Babson College’s globally recognized entrepreneurial thought and action principles, as well as introduction to emotional intelligence for our refugee programs. Courses are taught using varied techniques, including lectures, guest speakers, videos, and activities. Their website will act as a forum for students to post questions during and after the course to keep students engaged in an interactive manner. This years focus has been on Syrian refugees though they will expand to private high schools spanning across the Middle East in the years to come. 

Some members involved include co-founders Aboudi Al-Qattan and recent graduate Fredrik Rading, and partner, rising Senior Hamza Bilbeisi 

Below is from their latest post on their blog – June 6, 2016

What a start to the new week! We gave students thirty minutes to finish off last weeks’ projects (identifying a problem with the IMC Center and proposing ways to solve it) before they had to present it to us. As is evident in the picture above, our students took time to think outside the box and create practical solutions that bettered the IMC Center. The cup holder pictured above, that says “water” in Arabic, was constructed completely by one of the student groups—they identified that there were water cups scattered everywhere and made a product to fix it.

Once each project was finished, the groups presented their products, highlighting the resources they used, the value of their product, and who the “customer” was. We also introduced two key terms to encourage peers to help students modify their products, “devil’s advocate” and “constructive criticism”. To our surprise we didn’t need to probe the students to offer advice to the groups presenting- a nice improvement from last week. Everybody was engaged from the start and displayed genuine interest in helping each other improve their respective ideas. This was quite impressive and encouraging to see—however there were times when students were slightly too harsh on each other. We are going to cover these concepts again tomorrow in order to stress that “constructive” is the key word in “constructive criticism”.

We felt that starting off our week like we ended last week, with an engaging activity, was a great way to get our students active and thinking ahead for what will be our final few classes. This week students are going to focus heavily on their communities and how they can become leaders and motivate change. Similarly to the “Foundations of Management and Entrepreneurship” course at Babson, students will now pitch an idea for a product or service that can be implemented into their immediate communities. Each student will focus on identifying the SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) as well as our own version of a business model canvas. Students will pitch their initial ideas in groups of two and then take a blind vote on their favorite three ideas. At this point we’ll start to introduce concepts that each team will be able to apply to their projects, like how to market the product/service as well as how to generate revenue streams.

To top it off, our major partner Fikra Al Mashi was recently recognized for their service to the Jordanian community. As a result, Al-Tareeq was also mentioned in the Jordanian media! We are not only honored but also motivated to continue working hard.