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OAI courses: Create Your Activism Plan workshop; Create Your Activism Plan mentorship with Adel Esmat

Vision: Restoring Cairo’s cultural heritage

Goal: Restoring architecture in downtown Cairo

Message: "Cairo deserves it."

Primary audience: Cairo political leaders

Secondary audience: Downtown Cairo shopkeepers

How I delivered my message: Through the internet, the media, and conferences

Coalitions/allies: Professional associations and unions

Current activities: Gaining Cairo shopkeepers' support for the restoration of neighborhood buildings.

Watch Manal's "Meet the Activist" interview to learn more about her!

About Manal and her activism goals:

"I'm an architect and general director of the Model Projects Department in the National Organization for Urban Harmony in the Ministry of Culture. We’re working on a very important project to restore the cultural face of Cairo.

"The project has three stages. Stage one will involve work on the buildings overseeing Tal’at Harb Square. Stage two will cover the area from Tal’at Harb Square to Mustafa Kamel Square, and stage three will cover the area from Mustafa Kamel Square to El-Kiklya mosque.

"The project aims to restore the aesthetic value to those buildings by getting rid of all the violations committed throughout the past fifty years, to get those buildings back to the way they were, and spread the ideals of beauty and the values of those times."

What Manal learned from her OAI experience:

"We began [our project] with wrong methods. We began work without a plan to take into account the nature of those places and the people in them, like shopkeepers in these areas. So we met with strong resistance, but through the courses I took, I acquired some leadership skills and learned how to work in a measured, organized way."

The actions Manal has taken as a result of her OAI experience:

Before her OAI training and mentoring, Manal was challenged by strong opposition to her activism project from shopkeepers in downtown Cairo; she described them as "completely resistant, totally unwilling to work with us, because they’re really scared of us and the repercussions of our project for them."

However, after her training, Manal applied what she'd learned: "I began defining my target audience and the message directed to them. Shopkeepers in the area were one of our targeted audiences because of their [personal/business] interests, so we held meetings with them to explain the project’s goal and how it would benefit them. We got a good result; after they understood the project, we gained a large number of supporters for the project among shopkeepers, and they helped us finish our work."

Thanks to Manal's OAI training, she was able to transform opponents into supporters. People who had previously been unwilling to work with her helped her finish the architectural restoration project.