Empowerment Through Integration (ETI)

I am an internationally known speaker and activist and the Founder of Empowerment Through Integration (ETI). As a Lebanese-American Muslim woman who lost my sight at age seven, I am committed to the empowerment and authentic inclusion of people with disabilities, which stems from my experience growing up as a child with a disability who always felt supported and empowered by my family and community. 

However, most children with disabilities around the world are marginalized and excluded, which robs them of their potential and robs society of their value. In 2009 with support from the Clinton Foundation as a student at Wellesley College, I ran Camp Rafiqi, an inclusive summer camp for youth with and without disabilities in Lebanon. In 2011 I founded ETI, and then attended Harvard Kennedy School to learn how to lead a movement and develop innovative programs that create lasting, systemic, values-driven changes in society.

Many communities around the world lack access to basic and appropriate services for youth with vision impairments (YVIs), leading to the exclusion and underrepresentation of people with disabilities (PWDs) in society, especially in underserved communities located in developing countries. 

ETI is proposing an eLearning program that will provide a hybrid of virtual and in-person training to family members of youth with vision impairments (YVIs), as well as professionals who interface with YVIs (teachers, humanitarian workers, etc) in communities that don’t otherwise have access to similar training.

In the next decade, through ETI’s work, YVIs  in underserved communities will have a noticeable increase in quality of life (based on key indicators). By elevating the quality of life of individuals with disability and other marginalized individuals, previously excluded and underrepresented voices will feel valued and empowered and will be fully integrated and able to contribute to society.

According to information released by The World Bank, in 2020, more than 15% of the global population - over 1 billion individuals - are living with disabilities. Out of this group, the World Health Organization (WHO) informs that 80% live in developing countries. In these countries, social exclusion of PWDs, amplified by society’s misconceptions about disabilities, culminates in 90% of children with disabilities not attending school (UNESCO), comparatively higher percentages of women and girls with disabilities being victims of abuse at home (Disability World), and restricted access to any form of health care treatments (WHO).

 A lack of adequate skills and knowledge among families of PWDs and professionals, including, but not limited to educators and health care providers, in underserved communities, contribute to and exacerbate this problem. ETI’s specialized and tailored training targets and meets the needs of these groups, at the same time, that it builds the capacity of each local community to transform and sustain a mindset shift associated with the value of PWDs in that community. Through ETI’s training, families and professionals are equipped with the necessary knowledge to empower PWDs and promote awareness about the need to transform the stigma against disabilities in their communities.

Negative perceptions and low expectations of individuals who are blind or visually impaired by community members are often caused by a lack of education and awareness. This may lead to unhealthy beliefs and superstitions which limit their access to basic services and have the potential to threaten their lives. ETI’s eLearning is an innovative project whose goal is to meet the needs of communities around the globe impacted by vision loss. By providing e-Learning to families of infants and children with blindness or visual impairments, to educators in typical schools as well as schools for children who are blind or visually impaired, to business owners, to government officials, ETI creates measurable change on a world-wide scale. ETI’s approach is to provide e-Learning, as well as optional face-to-face training, in a model that emphasizes a train-the-trainer approach whereby educational vision specialists provide multi-modality instruction to participants. Videos, handbooks, live virtual meetings, and face-to-face training options are available along with a plan for follow-up training and monitoring to ensure accountability and quality outcomes. By providing training to community members, individuals with visual impairments will directly benefit in the form of access to early intervention, education, employment, and overall inclusion in the community.

ETI’s trainings have been administered via direct service programs for the past 10 years in Lebanon and has impacted over 1000 individuals, including YVI (5 to 27 years old), families and local professionals, including Lebanese and Syrian and Palestinian refugees. Our trainings have been designed by education vision and orientation and mobility specialists in the USA and our curriculum adapted on a yearly basis using as parameters, data collected on the ground via surveys, and interviews with ETI’s beneficiaries. In 2020, ETI is developing a virtual and hybrid extended version of our specialized life skills trainings that will be available to our beneficiaries in Lebanon as well as to beneficiaries in other underserved communities around the globe. Our specialists are using their extended experience as international educators, including with our programming in Lebanon, to adjust our training as per needs associated with underserved communities in multiple countries. Upon launching of our updated hybrid training model in 2021, surveys and interviews with local beneficiaries will be administered by local partners to inform ETI about each community’s needs and best ways to engage individuals with ETI’s training as we expand our programming to underserved communities in other countries.

Our project relates most closely with elevating opportunities for all people, especially those who are traditionally left behind. Traditionally, PWDs are a very marginalized group still very underrepresented in all spaces.

It also hits on elevating understanding of and between people through changing people’s attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Inherent to achieving the inclusion and integration of PWDs is changing people’s attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors surrounding disability, which is a core tenet of ETI’s training methodology. ETI’s work has the potential to elevate humanity as we transform these spaces and capacitate their members to act as agents for social good.

I founded ETI because I have personally witnessed and experienced, as a blind woman, the extreme ways that society can either marginalize and undervalue or empower and integrate us, people with disabilities. Because I believe that inclusion for all is a value for all, I created ETI when I was an undergraduate student at Wellesley College and, thanks to a Clinton Foundation grant, we launched our first program. Since 2011, ETI’s team of like-minded colleagues from multiple ethnic, international, and cultural backgrounds, some of them individuals with disabilities themselves, have provided direct services to YVIs, their families, communities, and professionals. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we had to pause our in-person programming and quickly adapt to the current and future circumstances with required social distancing. As a direct result of our programmatic adjustment to these circumstances, our team of specialists is currently adapting our training as a hybrid model, including virtual and on-the-ground training, to be re-launched in 2021. Interest from our international partners associated with bringing our specialized hybrid training to their underserved communities is high and we are looking forward to expanding our impact and bring these much-needed services to multiple communities around the globe.  

This project is incredibly personal to me. As a blind Lebanese-American woman, who lived most of my life between two different countries, Lebanon and USA, I have experienced the impact of two very separate and contrasting realities that differ mostly regarding their respective mindsets and behaviors about disabilities and the availability of adequate services for PWDs. In the USA, with my family members and I having had access to trained and qualified professionals from multiple fields, I have directly and indirectly benefited from the resources available to me, among which, inclusion-based services executed by educators, health care providers and others. While in Lebanon, the absence of available specialized training for community members led by professionals who should be equipped and trained to not only serve but empower me as a valuable individual in my community, made me understand the detrimental and long-lasting impact that the absence of these invaluable resources can have on individuals living in these underserved communities. Therefore, it is my personal goal to transform, through ETI’s work, the mindsets of families of YVI and professionals in underserved communities so PWDs in these communities can elevate their humanity and be fully integrated as active members in these societies.

Empowerment Through Integration (ETI) is a non-profit organization that creates programs that aim to transform the stigma associated with disabilities and enable individuals with disabilities to gain the skills and confidence to participate more fully in their families and communities. Our programming better prepares them for educational and employment opportunities and enables them to impact the lives of those around them. In this regard, ETI’s Programs have not only aimed to facilitate the social inclusion of individuals with disabilities, but also for their peers, family, friends, and community members to recognize the value of inclusion. Furthermore, ETI’s expertise also includes the design of capacity building programs that aim to equip audiences from multiple sectors (governments, private sector, etc) on how to promote authentic inclusion in their own institutions and expand their impact to multiple societal levels. ETI has been addressing issues associated with social inequalities, particularly associated with the historical exclusion of individuals with disabilities for the past 10 years, through our direct services in Lebanon and, since 2019, ETI has started to intentionally branch out towards the development of materials, such as our Inclusive Education Manual, and online and in-person specialized trainings to continue to address and transform the exclusion and stigmas associated with PWDs. As a result of ETI’s programs, initiatives, training and collaborations with different sectors, ETI contributes to the development of a truly inclusive society, which will have long lasting positive effects as we elevate humanity and multiply local and global inclusion heroes.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, ETI had a financial hit, which pushed our organization to adapt and change our program delivery model to sustain its impact during social distancing guidelines.  We had to first recover from lost income of around USD$250,000 that was directly because of programs cancelled due to COVID-19. Once we were able to secure emergency funding, we turned to our programs. In 2020, we were pushed to expedite the creation of our eLearning as a way to avoid interruption of our capacity training services to families of YVI in Lebanon and expand our impact to other international underserved communities. One key adversity that we had to face was the capacity training of our trainers to develop the necessary skills needed to produce high quality videos and virtual classes for our eLearning. Having our team spread out in their respective homes was challenging and we had to quickly and creatively adapt our virtual training to supplement the gaps in knowledge, particularly associated with video recording by our life skills specialists. Our team committed to learning additional video recording and directing skills and we have already advanced the completion of two eLearning courses by the summer of 2020.

My experience growing ETI’s reputation and offerings in Lebanon and globally demonstrate my leadership ability and potential to lead not just an organization, but a movement to change mindsets and priorities on national and global levels. ETI had its origin as one summer camp in Lebanon, and after I realized my passion for expanding this camp, I founded ETI in 2011 and built out additional programs. As ETI’s Founder and CEO, I mobilized communities across Lebanon to become a well-known and highly respected organization across youth, their families, and their communities where parents, schools, UNHCR, and more wanted to have their youth participate in our programs. I led ETI to become an organization that was known beyond our direct service programs to a leading voice on disability inclusion in Lebanon and globally. Through my leadership expanding ETI’s notoriety, we were invited to the Presidential Palace in Lebanon. Additionally, we were consulted as advisors to the Prime Minister of Lebanon on disability inclusion. Further, I have brought this narrative to a global stage in spaces like the United Nations Headquarters. Over the span of ETI’s first decade, we are now at the forefront and are bringing disability inclusion into countless spaces.

Innovation is at the core of our values, our model of delivery, and the sustainability of our outcomes. Established ideas and policies about including people with disabilities predominantly focus on human rights and technical accessibility. Our work is unique and disruptive because, unlike most organizations that focus on disabilities, we go one step further and include human rights as a baseline, not as our entire programmatic framework. Our humanitarian work is, instead, designed and implemented based on values-based lenses, which means that we operate with the understanding that inclusion of PWDs is a value for society at large.

Our unique approach is included in our target audience, which includes families of YVI and professionals in underserved communities in developing countries, who experience a complete absence of adequate resources and specialized capacity training that can promote authentic inclusion mindsets and behaviors. Through our project, we capacitate key community members to become catalysts of change within their own communities, which reflects our primary goal to promote sustainable and long-lasting transformative impact within these communities. Finally, our project is innovative due to its unique feature that allows and intentionally promotes the bridging of underserved communities in developing countries with international specialists in the field of specialized life skills for blind and visually impaired youth. Hence, we also impact international specialists and trainers themselves, who benefit from expanding their awareness and scope of their work by reaching out to the communities that in most need of services in remote regions in the globe.

In 2020, due to COVID-19 disrupting our programs on the ground as well as the financial hit that we experienced as an organization as a direct consequence of the repercussions of the pandemic, as well as the impact of social distancing requirements on our group of beneficiaries in Lebanon, we had to temporarily reduce the number of beneficiaries currently receiving our services, and we are currently serving a fraction (one fourth) of our pool of beneficiaries, i.e. 20 beneficiaries, with our programs in Lebanon. In 2021, as we pilot our eLearning with partners in three additional underserved communities in different areas in the globe, our goal is to reach out and serve a total of 300 beneficiaries and families by the end of that year. As we progress with our expansion, in five years, our goal is to serve 1,000 beneficiaries, including families and professionals in underserved communities, with our specialized and hybrid training.

Our goal is to create a genuinely inclusive future where all persons with disabilities are valued and empowered, and for every space to believe that the inclusion of all is a value for all. 

Our impact goal is to have youth with vision impairments in underserved communities experiencing an increase in their quality of life be empowered, and be fully integrated in society. Within the next year our goals are to select 3 partners to pilot our eLearning to, reaching 300 beneficiaries and families in 2021. Within the next five years, our goal is to have strong, sustainable partnerships implementing our programs in 3 regions. We want to have key metrics established to measure the success of our eLearning, and have marked improvements in the quality of life of YVIs, as measured by a set of key indicators.

Disrupting the stigma, pity, and disempowerment around disability is a vast goal, but all it takes to empower another person is one person affirming your value and potential. Globally reaching thousands of participants, ETI unleashes the potential each person has to bring lessons of authentic inclusion back into their communities. Further, the impact of our work is in the unleashed potential when each previously marginalized child is empowered with confidence and skills to thrive. Many of ETI’s youth participants have returned years later, telling us that ETI empowered them to embrace their disability and gave them tools to contribute to society and the strength to say “I can” instead of “I can’t.”

We currently partner with two UN entities in Lebanon to provide our direct services to youth with visual impairments and their families. The first UN entity is the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which has been a partner with ETI for the past three years and continues to support us in the provision of our direct services (i.e. family workshops and individual and group specialized life skills training) to refugees in Lebanon. The second UN entity is the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Lebanon. In 2020, ETI has started a collaboration with UNDP to expand the empowerment of youth with visual impairments by integrating ETI’s beneficiaries as part of UNDP’s Youth Leadership Program (YLP). In addition to ETI’s role to support the youth to navigate diverse settings with other individuals with and without disabilities and virtual spaces, ETI has also been responsible for conducting inclusion and accessibility training for other local non-profit organizations and UNDP representatives, who are also collaborating for the execution of activities associated with YLP in Lebanon. In addition, we are currently selecting 3 partner organizations to pilot our eLearning in 2021 in countries in the MENA region, including UNHCR in Lebanon, who has already expressed interest in formally including access to ETI’s eLearning as part of our joint efforts to promote capacity training on inclusion of PWDs among refugees and UNHCR staff and partnering organizations.