A Green Revolution

Che Guevara had his motorcycle and they had their bicycles. Revolutionaries on wheels went from all corners of Cairo to Tahrir Square to demand a better future for their country. They got there faster than most, as traffic was a killer and the metro station on Tahrir square was no longer operative.

Once there, they voiced their demands for freedom and dignity. The people demanded the removal of the regime and the regime obliged.

On the 12^th of February the revolution showed a new even more beautiful face, overnight it metamorphosed into a green revolution.

People cleaned Tahrir square, separating waste at source and sweeping every grain of dust on the pavement. Afterwards, they started repairing and painting the sidewalks and fences.

Seeing thousands of people brooms and paint brushes in hand in Tahrir Square on the 12^th of February brought tears to my eyes. Egyptians were finally reclaiming their streets and concerned with the beautification of their surroundings.

I asked myself, why would that be? Is it a new born sense of ownership? Is it the hope that was born with the revolution? (here are the thoughts of my friend and co-founder of the NM-Green Arm, Ahmed El Dorghamy)

Will the revolution impact cycling?

The old regime which was a bit tight on agglomerations and under the emergency law police kept their eyes on large gatherings. Egyptian cyclists occasionally riding in groups of 300 were harassed. Ride leaders were interrogated as to the nature of activities (and whether the rides were demonstrations of some sort) and requested to issue permits for events gathering a large number of people.

Now that the right to peaceful demonstration has been granted (or rather snatched from the claws of the regime) and at a time when we expect the lifting of the emergency laws, can we hope for a change? Can we expect thousands of cyclists to fill the very same square that called for democracy to in turn call for a bicycle friendly city?

Will Cairo that kept the whole world glued to television and computer screens in the past weeks be the next Critical Mass city?

Critical Mass is a bicycling event typically held on the last Friday of every month in over 300 cities around the world. The ride was originally founded in 1992 in San Francisco. The inspiration behind the ride was to create social space via the bicycle. The purpose of Critical Mass is not usually formalized beyond the direct action of meeting at a set location and time and traveling as a group through city or town streets on bikes, although for some bigger scale events there is an activist group formed around it, organizing the rides and communicating the desires and problems of the cyclists to the city council.

Critical Mass rides have been perceived as protest activities. A 2006 New Yorker magazine article described Critical Mass' activity in New York City as "monthly political-protest rides", and characterized Critical Mass as a part of a social movement; and the UK e-zine Urban75, which advertises as well as publishes photographs of the Critical Mass event in London, describes this as "the monthly protest by cyclists reclaiming the streets of London."

Do women have a bigger Carbon Footprint?

Transportation is a large contributor to air-pollution. Today, the whole world is shifting towards more sustainable means of transportation. While in most countries men and women are equally active in such a movement, in more traditional societies, women are denied the right to a safe street where they can walk or use their bicycles instead of driving cars.

Egypt is one of those countries and I am on of the women.

In the early days of the Cairo Cycler's Club, a friend and me, both working in the filed of sustainable development, got all analytical about it and decided to explore the reasons that got people cycling and the reasons that discouraged them from cycling. We found that, in part, some women could not use bicycle in their daily commutes due to widespread harassment on Cairo streets. Most found themselves confined to the weekly Friday rides when streets were emptier, resorting cycling merely as an urban sport. Even on Fridays they could not ride alone, and had to tag along with a group of friends, preferably male. To the surprise of many, on Fridays 60% of the cyclists are girls from all walks of life, adorning sportswear, urban wear, veils, helmets and t-shirts saying diverse messages. Also, a few brave women have ventured on weekdays on their own to cycle to their workplace in spite of harassment.

While regular street harassment is offensive and psychologically disturbing, harassing cyclists could kill. The cyclists could lose balance if frightened or grabbed, and sometimes causing this unbalance is even the harasser's intention.

To provide its women members with a safer riding experience, the Cairo Cycler's Club (CCC) has partnered with two anti-harassment initiatives.

The first, Harassmap has put in place a system for reporting incidences of sexual harassment via SMS messaging. By mapping these reports online, the initiative will act as an advocacy, prevention, and response tool, highlighting the severity and pervasiveness of the problem.

The second, 678, the movie, is a docudrama shedding light on the issue of sexual harassment and its root causes.

CCC is planning an awareness raising event with Harassmap & 678 in the near future, to advocate for safe streets. We hope that this partnership will be fruitful.

We also wish for the spirit of respect that prevailed in Tahrir square during the protests to live on and radiate to the whole city.

The Egyptian revolution & Social Entrepreneurship

On the 11^th of February I was singing in Tahrir square Horreya, Horreya Freedom, Freedom at the top of my lungs. I was so ecstatic I could not sleep until 6am the next day. I checked the Wikipedia article about the Revolution of 2011 to make sure it was real, the page of Hosni Mubarak "former" president of Egypt, I checked articles, played songs and emailed friends all over the globe.

Among the emails I sent was a note to Bill Drayton, the founder of Ashoka, one of my mentors, and the man who coined the term Social Entrepreneurship. I wanted to share with Bill a moment when his motto "Everyone a Changemaker" came to life, and to thank him for his teachings that kept me believing in the Revolution.

Social entrepreneurs are individuals with innovative solutions to society’s most pressing social problems. They are ambitious and persistent, tackling major social issues and offering new ideas for wide-scale change.

Rather than leaving societal needs to the government or business sectors, social entrepreneurs find what is not working and solve the problem by changing the system, spreading the solution, and persuading entire societies to take new leaps.

Social entrepreneurs often seem to be possessed by their ideas, committing their lives to changing the direction of their field. They are both visionaries and ultimate realists, concerned with the practical implementation of their vision above all else.

Each social entrepreneur presents ideas that are user-friendly, understandable, ethical, and engage widespread support in order to maximize the number of local people that will stand up, seize their idea, and implement with it. In other words, every leading social entrepreneur is a mass recruiter of local changemakers—a role model proving that citizens who channel their passion into action can do almost anything.

Through the Revolution I have seen the character of my paisanos -fellow ountrymen- evolve into a beautiful personification of social entrepreneurship.

In my head the recipe for a social entrepreneur is:

socially conscious + entrepreneurial + creative+ persistent + obsessed with a cause

Has social entrepreneurship influenced the revolution? I can affirm that all the social entrepreneurs I know have participated in the revolution.

Will social entrepreneurship rise in the aftermath of the revolution? I was asked this question in an interview recently and my answer was: the ingredients that make a social entrepreneur are all there and people believe in themselves.

Social entrepreneurship is above all a state of mind, a social conscience intertwined with willpower. This spirit of righting wrongs no matter what it costs, a spirit of persistence, determination and obsession with your cause. In other words: the spirit of the revolution and of the demonstrators who spent 18 days to topple a dictator. They were obsessed with their goal and refused to go home before the Fall of the Regime.

As an artist and a firm believer in the power of art for social change I was overjoyed with the bomb of creativity that exploded in Tahrir, in the form of protest posters, graffiti art and songs of revolt. Where there's creativity there's innovation, and where there's innovation, entrepreneurship.

Today, a little over a week after the fall of the regime, entrepreneurial initiatives with a social impact in mind are filling cyberspace. One would get no less than seven invites per day to Facebook groups calling for political participation, street cleanups and donations to poor families, among others. Youth are finally becoming socially conscious after breaking their bubbles of isolation.

After working for Ashoka I started mentoring social entrepreneurs at an earlier stage, that of starting their social enterprises and social businesses (through the renown Egyptian NGO Nahdet El Mahrousa). My experience makes me feel that all young people in the region need is reassurance. If you can help them be themselves and listen to their inner voice, to refuse to be part of conformist societies that discourage change and shun risky ventures, they will go against all odds and get to their destination.

At my days at Ashoka, I compared finding new social entrepreneurs to picking saffron; the search was by no means easy. The task will now be much easier.

As role models emerge, others, who were in the backseat at the time of change, would believe in their own power in bringing about change and we will have a country and perhaps a region where "Everyone [is] a Changemaker"

More on the topic:

An article about how social entrepreneurs have participated in the Revolution

An article comparing Egyptian demonstrators to social entrepreneurs

Last but not least an article about why we need more social entrepreneurs in the Middle East in the aftermath of the revolutions in the region, couldn't agree more

More organizations supporting social entrepreneurs:

the Skoll Foundation, the Omidyar Network, the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, Root Cause, New Profit Inc. , and Echoing Green

The People Demand the Fall of the Regime

I listened to the shouting crowds from my balcony yesterday (25^th of January 2011), as groups of protesters were heading to Tahrir square. I wished I could join but fear held me back. Fear of being harassed or harmed by the forces of the National Security* , fear that going through pain and humiliation would make me more and more hateful of our circumstances, and thus lose my stamina towards carrying on my efforts in making things better on the long term without any political confrontation.

As the government started manipulating the media and blocked Twitter in order to prevent protestors from communicating with each other, I felt I could no longer stay in. A one minute phone call from a friend got me out of the house, together we went to Tahrir square.

Yesterday was a firm answer putting an end to all the allegations and make-believe that the current system, in spite of its shortcomings, is the better option for the Egyptian people. It was, in a way, a revision of all that I have been taught in Political Science courses. And because I believe in what I’ve learned, I see a ray of hope. If change doesn’t happen now, it is bound to happen sometime soon. We have changed, and we have proven that we want and deserve the change. And even if all political theories fail to forecast what will happen next, one theory stands true, God is Fair.

First, it is a message to people who claim to be intellectual and civilized, the people who look down at the crowds in disdain calling it “an ignorant population that does not deserve democracy”, as if they alone got the exclusive seal of democracy for being from a long gone aristocratic decent or holding passports from democratic countries, without possessing any of the democratic political culture of those countries. Yesterday for the first time, I was not subject to sexual harassment in the most crowded neighborhood in Cairo. For the first time I saw young people -other than environmentalists- picking up the garbage, and thousands of people, united despite their differences, sharing food, and water and exchanging opinions, carrying appropriate respectful banners.

Second, it’s an answer to all those who think that the Muslim Brotherhood is the only alternative. We did not see any of them in the demonstrations, and I can affirm that the only person I heard chanting religious statements while asking for the downfall of the government, received minimal response compared to other protestors.

Third, it is a response to all those who do not value information and freedom of expression. Any contribution adds weight even if it’s through the Internet pages. I admit I was critical of all the Twitter activists in the past, feeling they were merely armchair activists who filled cyberspace with nothing but complaints. I apologize for that now. If it weren’t for social media, the information sharing and above all the feeling of unity that spread across the nation, the protests would not have attracted the great numbers they witnessed yesterday.

Yesterday has proved that we all have a role to play, each according to what he does best. If it weren’t for the people who stayed at home trying to find means of sharing information through the Internet or telephones, and if it weren’t for those who put efforts to transmit and provide coverage of the events, we would have all believed that police officers received flowers and gifts in celebration of the police day and similar ridiculous stories (as published in Al Akhbar newspaper), most interesting of which the fact that some newspapers announced the end of the protests before they actually ended. If it weren’t for those who shared facts on how to deal with the tear gas through the various communication channels, many of us, who are far from experienced in the game of protests and demonstrations, would not have lasted these many hours.

Fourth, it is an answer for all those who accuse opposition forces of being traitors. Leaders of opposition parties showed up yesterday and integrated into the crowds without carrying the signs or slogans of their parties, they joined the crowd united for one cause: the fall of the regime.

Fifth, it is a response for those who said “we are not like Tunis”, no we are like Tunis and more. I do not deny that I initially looked at the issue from a purely theoretical perspective. I believed that we needed to have a large educated middle class united towards one goal, rather than a polarized population between a struggling lower class, and an indifferent upper class. However, yesterday proved that all Egyptians agree on one thing: they have had enough. Even those who are not facing the daily struggle of finding food for survival have empathy and a long term vision.

My generation is raised on a culture of non-confrontation; we have had fear built into us since we were born. We are a generation whose intellectuals have been terrorized by the ruling regime, taught to conform and obey. Now is the time to learn the rules of the game, we have a revolution to run.

* As I left the demonstration, I could sense the hesitation and confusion of the national security guards, as if what is on their minds is “maybe these people are right”

This piece has been translated to English from Arabic, it is also available in Spanish. It has been published in the Arab World, Europe, the United States and Latin America through friends all over the globe who needed eye-witness accounts.