Uzma Sulaiman

My name is Uzma Sulaiman.  I’m the Associate Director of Partnerships at Community Jameel.  I’m incredibly proud to work at Community Jameel,  specifically because of the values that the organization has and I think this is very much testament to the Family and the values that they’ve instilled within the organization.  There’s a strong sense of creativity and collaboration that exists and this is coupled with an incredibly strong work ethic, a sense of humility and also a sense of daring, into what Community Jameel can achieve.  I think those values are very important and it’s one of the reasons that I’m very proud to be part of Community Jameel.

I’ve only been working at Community Jameel for a relatively short amount of time.  I have a background in international development and I’ve always been very much aware of Community Jameel, as have my colleagues, and when we had the opportunity to work with Community Jameel we didn’t know what to expect and we were so impressed by the innovative approach to programing.  And now that I’ve worked for Community Jameel I’m so proud to be accepted into this into this Family into this team.

The first person in the Family that I met was Hassan.  And, we were about to go into a meeting in Jordan and I was terrified because I didn’t know what to expect and I obviously wanted to make a really good impression.  And I went in, and he was so incredibly kind and so professional.  He always referred to me and always brought me into the conversation.  He was just always aware of the people that surrounded him and it was that sense of compassion.  And again it’s kind of instilled into Community Jameel and the way that we conduct our programing, the kind of awareness and the consideration to the community.

Even in our scholarship programs at the Royal College of Music and MIT, the Family are always concerned about the students. They’re always asking about them and  they’re always asking for us to find any opportunity to promote the students.  It really is just a genuine sense of caring about about people.

So, a lot of organizations they would look at the world look at the problems and they would say ‘okay that is unsolvable we won’t be able to tackle that one’ and that is the complete opposite way of working at Community Jameel – l the harder the better!  They’ll watch a documentary, they’ll read a newspaper article and it’ll be ‘oh this is the problem that nobody’s been able to to crack’ and that, it’s really inspiring because when you first get you’re like oh this seems too complicated and then the way that, again, they’re able to ,like you know, dissect that information, the way that they’re able to corral this international efforts of academics, is something that Community Jameel does.  It’s something that the Family does, and they do it incredibly well.

I want to say congratulations to the Family for 75 years.  I’m at the start of my journey but I am so excited at the future – and if it’s anything like what the last little while has been like, I know that it’s going to be innovative, it’s going to be daring, and it’s going to, I think, tackle some of the world’s biggest problems and I know that we’ll find solutions.  I have that much faith in the organization and the Family.  Thank you.

 

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