11 Avenue Sidi Boukhari
20079 Tangier
المغرب
- Youth and education
Resilient Communities is a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and Moroccan Association focused on sustainable development. We have four permanent staff and work seasonally with a team of contractors and interns. Fundraising, outreach, and management fees fund RC's projects in the following areas: training and development, collaborative projects, and community engagement. Our main partners include CorpsAfrica, the University of Cincinnati, and numerous local associations in the West and North Africa.
Our mission is to provide sustainable solutions for communities that lack basic services. We want these communities to be self-sufficient through education, awareness campaigns, trainings, programs, and projects that help them gain skills while strengthening their communities from within. Our vision is to implement sustainable community engagement projects, programs, and technology in small communities that are rapidly growing beyond their means. We aim to inspire residents, especially the youth, on how instrumental they are to leading change in their communities.
RC's current projects include leading an internship program of 3-10 interns from Morocco, the US, Nigeria, and Ghana in collaborative projects. Interns are trained in research skills, workshop design and facilitation, grant-writing, and project management. Projects that are currently being managed by RC or on which we serve as consultants to projects managed by local associations include (1) conducting well water analysis and finding solutions to improve health in Foum Tlit, (2) building a prototype home-build in Asgaour that was impacted by the earthquake, and (3) gathering needs assessment data throughout the Ourika Valley with our M&E app to create master plans for sustainable disaster recovery with the University of Cincinnati and local Moroccan governments.
The missions of RC and ALF intersect in several key areas: we empower youth in underprivileged communities to create change – social and, as a result, political. Our diverse group of interns connect those youth to the world at large and provide external growth opportunities for an internal approach to sustainability. Such educated, empowered, and connected youth do not turn toward extremist views in order to validate their places in the world, and they instead turn toward self-expression within their communities and personal, economical, and social development.
In the short-term, we are seeking to join ALF specifically to partner with other ALF organizations, StraitUp Tarifa and Global Societies. This will be for a project in which Resilient Communities leads a workshop series for other associations on how to replicate our internship program. RC has (if I may not-so-humbly say) an excellent internship program that can and should be replicated by other associations on both sides of the Mediterranean. In the long-term, we at RC would love to partner with ALF and other ALF organizations on other projects, and we will look to implement some of the ALF resources on gender and youth.