Interviews

Melek El Nimer is the founder of the Social Support Society and Unite Lebanon Youth Project, two NGOs based in Beirut, Lebanon. El Nimer begins the interview by reflecting on her upbringing in Turkey, followed by her decision to move abroad so she could pursue a B.S. in Business Administration at the American College of Switzerland. While studying there, she recounts meeting her husband, a Palestinian man whom she credits as having “everything to do with the way my life changed.”

After obtaining an M.S. in Accounting and Finance from Bosphorus University in Istanbul, El Nimer moved to Beirut in 1981. Upon moving there, she worked as a banker but also served on the board of one of the largest NGOs operating in the Palestinian refugee camps. In this role, she would often visit the camps, which had remained in detrimental conditions since their establishment after the exodus of Palestinians following the foundation of Israel in 1948. Describing the complete lack of infrastructure and inadequate sanitation, she explains how the camps were and continue to be places “that you have to see with your eyes to believe.” According to El Nimer, such conditions stem in part from the social position of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, as they have not been allowed to work in professions that require a syndicate. Regardless of educational qualifications, this meant that Palestinian refugees have been barred from jobs that would allow them to earn livable incomes.

Following her experiences visiting the refugee camps, El Nimer decided to quit her banking job to focus on addressing the pervasive problems faced by Palestinians refugees. Identifying the elderly as the most vulnerable subset of the population, she established the Social Support Society in 2006. As she explains, many of the elderly living in refugee camps had been there since 1948 and represented “the last generation that came from Palestine.” The Social Support Society conducts an array of programs to support the health and wellbeing of the elderly from both a physical and emotional standpoint. For example, El Nimer relates how their centers support physiotherapy clinics, but how the organization also organizes social or cultural activities meant to “let them know that they are still needed in society and that there’s still value added.” One such cultural activity involves recruiting seniors to help organize traditional Palestinian weddings, a successful program that El Nimer describes as a heritage revival.

El Nimer proceeds to discuss the founding of her second NGO, the Unite Lebanon Youth Project (ULYP) in 2010. ULYP seeks to empower marginalized refugee children in Lebanon. She explains how up until then, she had been bringing seniors from the Social Support Society as well as children from other NGOs to enjoy the outdoors on a large property south of Beirut. The fulfilling experiences that El Nimer saw children have on the property, which was owned by her late father in law, led her to transform it into a full campus that included classrooms and recreational facilities. ULYP expanded rapidly and soon developed scholarship programs to support the attainment of higher education for Palestinian and Syrian refugees. Today, ULYP supports 300 enrolled students and has nearly 800 graduates who have attended local and international universities. El Nimer encourages ULYP’s refugee students to attend universities abroad and seek employment opportunities outside of Lebanon, which she describes as having gone “from one crisis to another” given the repercussions of the Syrian refugee crisis, ongoing economic instability, COVID-19 and the deadly Beirut port explosion in 2020.

Turning to the question of gender, El Nimer relates how ULYP has encouraged an increasing number of female students to pursue opportunities for higher education abroad despite some resistance from families or the local community. She explains how “the number of excelling female students was always very high, but with that, the number that were willing to go abroad, or the families who were willing to send their daughters abroad, was much smaller.” Today, she expresses optimism about the fact that as a result of ULYP’s success stories, more families have been willing to support their daughters’ international education ambitions. El Nimer concludes the interview on a similarly optimistic note, reflecting on the impact that both ULYP and the Social Support Society have been able to achieve – an impact which she hopes will continue over the next decade with the establishment of an endowment that can support the myriad of programs run by both NGOs.

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