Very Important Projects Fund

The VIP.fund is a youth-focused philanthropy fund, empowering marginalized and displaced youth impacted by conflict. We run e-learning programs, crowdfund for college, and partner with institutions who further our beneficiaries' employment prospects. We’ve all seen the tragic effect war has on youth in the Middle East: young men recruited by corrupt organizations; young women often forced to marry rather than study. These young adults would opt to receive an education and secure an income if it were available. To solve these opportunity deficits, we’ve made a difference since 2015 by crowdfunding for students who cannot pay for university so they can earn an income through vocational, trade, web development, and other online training; helping choose careers with income-generating opportunities; applying for jobs; leveraging social media to build professional connections; and soft skills training. Our scalable community consists of an online platform of volunteers: scholars who upon graduating pay it forward to support other students, tech experts who help with operations, and mentors who guide students along their journey. The consequences of conflict and displacement on vulnerable populations have amplified the same risks that developing countries are facing right now: mass migration, poverty, radicalization, despair. Education and employment are the pathways to give marginalized youth 21st-century tools enabling them to thrive in the global community. We provide practical pathways to hope, and are excited to have launched our new and innovative project: Work4Education,building Syrian/Palestinian automated speech-recogntition dialects, putting edSeed students on the map as content creators, implementing “human in the loop” AI. We connect our students with companies offering online internships and employment. By tapping into their native language skills, W4E will be a gateway for our students to contribute tuition costs, learn AI basics, land internships in advanced AI, and graduate to employment opportunities. Students receive training, work 10-15 hours per week, with stipends deposited into their crowdfunding campaigns, then transferred directly to their university accounts. By establishing connections with cutting edge Silicon Valley firms, we’re nurturing lifelong relationships in a field offering career advancement. Currently with 44 W4E students, we can absorb hundreds more. We would like to improve AI training data labeling, using higher levels of AI services to implement an innovative new project that will build automated speech recognition of all Levantine Arabic dialects. We will build these new engines, assign them to our crowdfunding platform, and onboard more students looking to fund their education. We will license this language software because the Levantine Arabic dialects have not been explored till now; our instrument will assist other organizations working with underserved displaced students from this region.

Our platform is run almost exclusively by edSeed student volunteers: a model of learning while doing. They are the ones operating the VIP.fund on the ground level, the ones whose energy keeps our work relevant. Our students participate in national and international contests; recently, two students competed and won second and third place at the American University of Lebanon Switchboard Hackathon. Humans are natural tool users; technology is no exception. Tech had already transformed the world before the pandemic, but our journey through Covid has proven that the best way to serve forcibly displaced and marginalized young people—who often cannot move beyond borders—is to provide the online tools they need to learn and work. Our power is in our numbers, our connections in the tech industry and higher education, and in the inherent curiosity of our student learners. Work4Education represents advocacy for resilient, promising youth in the Levant region. With your support, we will continue this innovative, disruptive project as we ally with displaced youth by creating resources for relevant skills and hopes for a prosperous future. With W4E already in place, with positive outcomes such as tuition paid and internships in place, we are well-positioned to advocate for our student partners and incentivize companies to effect positive change in the lives of these young agents of change and renewal. For those who have lost their homeland, we have created a virtual homeland of hope. Connecting virtually with tech companies solves the problem of training when students cannot leave places of displacement. Work4Education participants learn work and/or AI skills, gain connections, and fund their education. In addition, they expand their scope. An edSeed medical student—while annotating an assigned Work4Education document—discovered something new about a biology topic and how AI could be used by physicians in her aspiring field, thus illustrating this project’s efficacy and relevance to our students. We will continue to use AI onboarding to streamline the process and allow more students to campaign for tuition, thus reducing the negative social/educational impact in refugee camps. Our project will also allow students to participate in training and employment regardless of geographic location. Our students will gain the expertise to build Syrian, Palestinian, Lebanese, and Jordanian dialect-detection AI models that thousands of others will use and that will contribute not only the creators’ education, but to student pride in their shared culture: the use of their dialect. By co-producing disruptive AI models that recognize these dialects, students will be co-owners with the VIP.fund, receiving ongoing income anytime the instrument is used by third parties. This approach is unique, unparalleled, scalable, and worthy of support because it deeply democratizes the linguistically marginalized and politically or economically displaced.

Displaced youth across the economic spectrum are at risk of disconnection because of limited access to education, jobs, and stable social environments. Our ecosystem of refugee youth, education, and tech empowers youth with knowledge and employment skills that can play a major role in post conflict peace-building. The Journal of Youth Development reveals “the next generation has been shown to be powerful change agents in their communities and are therefore critical to a communities’ health and nation’s success.” Youth employment instills a work ethic with a focus on empathy and social development. Displaced youth are the gateway to peace in their communities; opportunity is all they need to prosper. Our beneficiaries are agents of circularity. We seed their dreams and complete the cycle of generosity as they give back to their families, their nations, and the global community—a huge gap for philanthropy to fill, but the agency and social remittances these future leaders represent are a net benefit to the region in an increasingly globalized world and will shape their communities for years to come. We would love the additional support to help increase our impact. Through education and technology, we seek solutions that will enable the largest displaced demographic to gain financial independence, contribute to their host communities and collaborate in supporting their fellow Arabs globally; we can’t think of a better way to do this than using their native language skills.

Our students study physically and virtually in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Palestine (Gaza), Egypt, US, UK, Germany, and France–but we are connected virtually through Zoom, weekly student seminars, check-ins with our partner companies, and am active, constant Slack presence. We currently have 36 students employed through the Work4Education project, with 30 more expected by the end of November. The 36 have generated $41,829.04 in earnings so far. Students learn while earning, they use current communication tools such as Slack and Zoom, and they learn and implement business writing skills in English: emails, memos, etc. Several of our edSeed students have won training opportunities with companies like Transform VC, allowing them to apply for training with technology companies like LigaData and aiXplain. This is precisely our goal—that these projects provide the opportunity to meet and contact people who work with Silicon Valley companies like Microsoft and Amazon. Many university students apply for work to fund their education, and now we have more than 50 candidates who are being trained to start working with us shortly. In addition, we have implemented quality assurance teams so we can contact each other and exchange experiences.