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Brief about Nisreen Haj Ahmad

Nisreen Haj Ahmad is a pioneering Jordanian-Palestinian civic leader, community organizer, and storytelling strategist whose work has transformed how grassroots movements are built and sustained across the Arab world. As the co-founder and director of Ahel, Nisreen has trained and mentored hundreds of organizers, educators, and civic leaders to design impactful campaigns grounded in people power, public narrative, and collective dignity. Her influence spans borders, inspiring movements rooted in local context yet connected through shared values and strategic discipline.

Basic Information

Nisreen Haj Ahmad is based in Amman, Jordan, and works regionally across the Middle East and North Africa. She co-founded Ahel, a nonprofit organization that supports communities in organizing campaigns for justice, freedom, and dignity. With a background in law, international development, and public narrative, she combines legal expertise with deep experience in grassroots strategy and leadership development.

Background / Bio

Early Life & Education

Born into a Palestinian refugee family and raised between Jordan and Palestine, Nisreen’s early life was shaped by displacement, inequality, and an enduring belief in the power of people to claim their rights. Her upbringing taught her the value of voice, community, and collective action.

She earned a law degree from the University of Jordan and later pursued graduate studies in Public Administration and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, where she was mentored by Professor Marshall Ganz, a key figure in modern community organizing. There, she trained in public narrative, leadership, and strategic organizing—skills that would define her career upon returning to the Arab world.

Professional Experience

Before founding Ahel, Nisreen worked with international organizations including Oxfam, UNESCO, and Mercy Corps, where she focused on development, governance, and civic participation. These experiences exposed her to the structural limitations of top-down development models and deepened her commitment to bottom-up change led by local communities.

In 2011, she co-founded Ahel to fill a critical gap in the region—building organizing capacity among everyday people, especially women and marginalized groups, to lead campaigns for justice using storytelling, strategy, and solidarity.

Skills and Areas of Expertise

Leadership & Organizational Development

Nisreen’s leadership style is participatory, values-driven, and deeply rooted in relationship-building. Through Ahel, she has helped create resilient grassroots organizations by coaching teams on how to lead collaboratively, develop leadership pipelines, and build structures that sustain movements beyond individual leaders.

She supports organizations to clarify purpose, align values with actions, and adopt adaptive leadership frameworks suited to volatile social and political contexts.

Civic Engagement & Advocacy

Nisreen is an expert in designing and supporting civic campaigns that hold decision-makers accountable while centering the dignity and agency of affected communities. She specializes in training people to shift from passive beneficiaries of aid to active leaders of change, particularly in education reform, refugee rights, gender justice, and workers’ rights.

Her advocacy approach combines emotion and analysis—mobilizing people through values while using strategic thinking to build power and win demands.

Strategic Campaign Design

Nisreen trains civic leaders to craft clear, winnable campaigns rooted in their own context. She guides teams through goal-setting, power analysis, constituency mapping, action planning, and escalation. Her campaigns emphasize collective ownership, measurable impact, and long-term capacity building.

She has advised successful regional campaigns such as “We Want to Know” (a demand for public release of school exam results) and “I Am a Witness” (centered on protecting freedom of expression).

Narrative and Storytelling for Change

As one of the region’s foremost practitioners of Public Narrative, Nisreen helps leaders craft compelling “story of self, us, and now” messages to inspire collective action. She trains organizers to reclaim their personal experiences as sources of strength, challenge fear-based narratives, and build a sense of shared purpose among diverse groups.

Her storytelling work has empowered countless activists—especially women—to lead publicly with clarity, confidence, and courage.

Achievements & Highlights

Founding Ahel and Regional Campaigns

Nisreen’s founding of Ahel is one of the most significant contributions to civic organizing in the Arab region. Under her leadership, Ahel has supported more than 50 grassroots campaigns across Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia, and Sudan. These campaigns have achieved policy wins, shifted public opinion, and created lasting leadership communities.

Ahel’s organizing model has been adapted to diverse local struggles, from refugee rights to inclusive education and domestic worker justice.

Training Organizers Across the Arab Region

Nisreen has personally trained and mentored over 700 civic leaders, educators, and youth organizers. Her training methodology is experiential, participatory, and rooted in collective learning. She has built regional cohorts that continue to support one another through ongoing practice, reflection, and solidarity.

Many of her trainees have gone on to lead campaigns, found organizations, or serve in leadership roles within regional movements.

Thought Leadership in Community Organizing

Through articles, lectures, and interviews, Nisreen has elevated the discourse around organizing in Arabic. She has published widely on narrative, dignity-based campaigns, and the role of women in civic leadership. Her writings have appeared in outlets like Al Jumhuriya, 7iber, and academic forums on civic space in the MENA region.

She is also the driving force behind Nisaa’, a storytelling and organizing circle for Arab women, which helps build feminist leadership through collective practice.

Speaking Engagements and International Recognition

Nisreen has spoken at major international gatherings, including the Skoll World Forum, Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights, and CIVICUS World Assembly. She has been recognized as a regional changemaker by institutions such as the Open Society Foundations, Ford Foundation, and Ashoka Arab World.

Her voice is regularly sought for panels and dialogues on civic leadership, grassroots strategy, and movement resilience.

Target Audience or Collaborators

Grassroots Movements and Civic Leaders

Nisreen primarily works with community leaders, parents, students, workers, and women who want to lead change in their own neighborhoods. She builds their capacity to launch and sustain campaigns rooted in lived experience, dignity, and strategic action.

NGOs, Educators, and Trainers

She collaborates with nonprofits, teacher networks, and university educators to embed organizing tools and storytelling methods into training curricula. Her work supports institutions seeking to shift from service delivery to power-building and community transformation.

Regional and Global Advocacy Networks

Nisreen is part of multiple global networks focused on leadership development, civic space, and democratic organizing. She provides consultancy, curriculum design, and coaching to regional hubs, international NGOs, and cross-border coalitions advancing people-centered change.

Values and Vision

Core Beliefs

Nisreen believes that everyone can lead, and that leadership grows in relationship, not isolation. She champions collective action grounded in dignity—where organizing is not just about winning, but about transforming fear into courage, silence into voice, and disconnection into solidarity.

She emphasizes the power of local knowledge, believing that solutions must come from the people closest to the problem.

Long-Term Goals

Nisreen’s vision is to expand organizing infrastructure across the Arab region by:

• Training a new generation of Arab organizers rooted in relational leadership

• Embedding narrative and organizing into civic education systems

• Building sustained regional solidarity networks among grassroots campaigns

• Publishing Arabic-language resources on strategy, story, and power

She also seeks to mentor Arab women into leadership roles where they can shape the future of civic life through feminist values and public voice.