Lecture: Refugees in MENA: Restoring Agency in the Midst of Crisis

Join us for an evening lecture with Curt Rhodes, who has been awarded as Social Entrepreneur of the Year for the Middle East and North Africa by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship in recognition of his work through Questscope with marginalized youth in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and in the region. Curt Rhodes has spent over 30 years working with, and on behalf of, marginalized communities and young people across the Middle East. Dr. Rhodes began his career in the Middle East in the early Eighties, as Assistant Dean in the School of Public Health at the American University of Beirut. During the 1982 invasion of (west) Beirut, he volunteered in a community-based clinic alongside students and friends, doing around-the-clock triage for wounded and ill civilians. That was when the seed idea for Questscope began to take shape. Living and working with people in great suffering compelled him to find a way that he and others in the Middle East could assist the most vulnerable: participating with the voiceless ones in invisible communities. In 1988, Questscope was founded with the goal of putting the last, first. From the beginning, Questscope worked closely with local communities, identifying their aspirations and together addressing their greatest needs.