Transcript
RON BRUDER: Thank you, Kate. You’re a hard act to follow.
First of all, I would be remiss if I got up here and didn’t acknowledge the work that Synergos has done for me. When I got into this my knowledge of the non-profit world was de minimis. I had sat on a couple boards but really didn’t have any in depth understanding as to what it took to make a successful NGO. And Peggy and her team kind of bootstrapped me and made that happen. This would not have happened without her and the team. It’s been a phenomenal journey. We’ve been together almost a decade. We founded the foundation, we created it because we learned that in the region the school systems do not give the students the education that a labor market requires. So, for instance, I was in Jordan a couple weeks ago. I’m going back there in two weeks. Unemployment for college graduates is roughly double what it is for those that have just gone to high school. And that ratio applies throughout the region. So the bottom line is the more training you get the less your opportunities are ’cause the things you’re learning are not the things that are needed in the workplace.
And we decided to form it nine years ago little differently. We were advised, we hired the Brookings Institution, and Martin Indyk, and some other really bright people and so their advice to us was to create local foundations with local board, local chair people, local staff. And some of my initial advisors looked at them and said, “Well, you’re going to be allowing the inmates to run the asylum.” And it was a little controversial but at the end of the day it seemed like the way to go. So every one of our affiliates is locally run, locally operated. The chairman and the board put a lot of money into it and the staff works for that local foundation. We provide guidance, curriculum, some of the funding, methodologies. We get all of our affiliates together to learn best practices. A group, all of CEOs, for instance, were together last week in Dubai where we just launched a new operation and they spent several days just learning and had an agenda from each other.
And in the middle of October we have 150 people meeting in Cairo, and that group will sit and learn how to operate their foundations better. Presently we’re in Egypt, and we’re in Jordan. We’re in Morocco. We’re in Yemen. We’re in Gaza. We’re in the West Bank. We’re in Tunisia. We just opened up in Dubai. And thanks to the oil price drop for the first time we’ve been embraced by the Saudis and we have two programs going there simultaneously and I suspect a lot more that will happen. I believe we believe that if these societies are going to prosper and be peaceful and be good global citizens it’s necessary that the youth have reasonable opportunity and have the same opportunity that we do. I grew up in a poor neighborhood in Brooklyn and had student loans, scholarships to grad schools and life treated me well because I was in a place, I was in the right time at the right place. I see kids there that have just as much ambition, just as much intellect as I have and but they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time and we’re trying to level the playing field.
And we teach diverse courses such as air conditioning repair, landscaping. Our most powerful course, surprisingly, is to teach kids how to work and how to think because the, the school system there has been based on memorization. And memorization nowadays, when you have a, a phone that has gigabytes really isn’t valued for all that much. And so we teach kids work skills. We have a program that we developed with McGraw-Hill called “Work Place Success” and it teaches these kids how to write a resume, how to interview, critical thinking, leadership, team building, worth ethic, productivity, time management. And what really gives them, which has been shocking, is it gives them something we hadn’t planned on. It gives them self-confidence. When they leave the program they believe they can win. And if they believe they can win they do.
Eighty-five percent of our graduates are targeted to get into the labor market. That’s a high of 97 to 100% in Tunis, to a low of mid-30’s in Yemen. And in, in Yemen there’s a prime example. We lost two of our staff a few weeks ago. They were killed. And it was our expectation that they should take a week or two off and regroup. And so we called them up. I got on the phone. My CEO got on the phone. We said, “You know, take time off and, and absorb all this and let’s think what we want to do next.” And they said, “No, we thought about it and we need to do this. We’re taking one day off of mourning and then we are back and we’re going to be functioning stronger than ever. We’re not going to let this slow us down.” And they didn’t. They’re just out there. We’re the only US-funded entity right now in Yemen because we are Yemenis. There’s no Americans there at the moment. We teach, in Palestine we take Palestinians that have become engineers. You’re Palestinian your family wants you to be an engineer, like if you’re Jewish you family wants you to be a doctor.
Unfortunately there aren’t that many jobs for engineers so we train many of them to manage construction sites.
In Gaza, for instance, we take accountants, and we’ve taken them out of Islamic University, which was a bit controversial because Islamic University is affiliated with Hamas but then again, the whole region has such affiliation so we have to pick our battles carefully. And we got it approved by the State Department and so Islamic University was cranking out all these accountants but they really didn’t understand how to think or solve problems. They knew the debits were the left, the credits to the right, but they just didn’t understand how to be useful in a real life situation. And so we, we built at the University of Maryland a course teaching these kids how to think and solve problems. We threw problems at them for eight quarters and they had to be the brains behind it and solve ’em. And it’s amazing what happens when you take kids and you empower them.
I was at a graduation last year for Bank Misr. We had taken a whole bunch of kids from neighborhoods the bank really didn’t want and brought them to the bank and said, “These are going to be your next level entry bankers.” And we put them through our workplace success course. We put them through critical thinking. And 100 students, 100 graduates, unbeknownst to anybody, including their instructors, came up with four PowerPoint presentations to demonstrate how the bank can make more money.
The bank was shocked. They had never seen that from senior management. And it was real. Two of the methodologies were adopted. And so it was a game changer there. We also focus on empowering women as a first priority. So, for instance, in Yemen we’re up to average overall we’re over 50% women placement. But in Yemen it’s about 70, and Tunisia it’s 38.
And quite frankly I’m prouder of the 38 in Tunisia than I am of the 70 in Yemen because there’s never been women in the workforce in Tunisia and, and Yemen because they just, it’s very hostile to women and for them.
Quite frankly, the more we get in the more women we empower, the more acceptable it is and it’s, it’s changing the system. We have, as of last count, 28½ thousand students that have gone through our programs.
And it is, as Kate pointed out, a drop in the bucket but the reason I think it’s meaningful is as we go into these countries and do more and more I think we’re beginning in some instances and we’ll do more to create a tipping point where if we enough training it becomes unacceptable for other institutions to have business as usual and for their kids to go through programs and not get a job. So, for instance, in Morocco we’ve been really growing rapidly. MasterCard gave us a multimillion dollar foundation. Accenture has given us serious money.
And we’ve now, in addition to doing the training that we’re doing we’re now working with some of the institutions there. King Hassan II, one of the largest universities in the region, 27,000 students, 18%-I hope everybody’s listening-18% placement rate, which that means if you have your calculators on you 82% failure rate. The majority of the kids that go through the program expecting to get a job do not. And so we’re now working with them. We’re working with the Minister of Labor. I had a meeting last year with the Prime Minister and we’re mapping out strategies to change how education is delivered in Morocco. We’re expanding what we’re doing in Gaza. Tunisia, I’m going there in ten days. We’re going to get into the health care in a big way and maybe use some impact investing so supplement our, our donations. Most of what we are doing is funded by donations. And the good news is our donations have doubled in the last few years and continue to, to grow but as a businessperson I don’t want to see us dependent upon donations for the majority of our work.
And I think like Muhammad Yunus, who’s been a guide and mentor to me, that we can be creating things, projects that generate revenue and will sustain on economic times. We also have a small video that will give you some insight as to life in Yemen. Kate, hit it.
[VIDEO]
BRUDER: These have been very challenging times in the region and people wonder how we can survive and grow, and it has been challenging. On one hand, we only exist to place youth in jobs. If we can’t do that we don’t have any reason to be there and mucking around. And it’s harder to place youth in jobs during these times. But by and large our numbers are going up. Our percentages are not where I’d like them to be. I think we’re at 69% placement. I’d like to see it back at 80. But we, we’re, we’re giving hope in these countries. Even in Yemen after we lost the two workers I had a conversation with Alwan Shivani. Alwan ran the Yemen Airlines. He ran, he owned the DHL franchise, the Hertz franchise. He’s a very serious Yemini businessman. And his wife is from Spain and they have a home in Marbella. And I said, “Alwan, get thy butt out of Yemen and to Marbella.”? And he’s, no, he’s staying there until we launch two additional programs.
[VIDEO]
BRUDER: By the way, that short DVD was created by volunteers from the region. We did not hire a professional firm to do it. It was cobbled together by people who share our passion. Thank you.