Alum Empowers Muslim Women

Recent graduate Rana Abdelhamid ’15, a current Truman Scholar and Pickering Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, was recently featured by the Associated Press, BBC News, and Elle Magazine for her organization, the Women’s Initiative for Self-Empowerment, or WISE.

After being accosted for wearing a headscarf in her hometown of New York City when she was 16, Abdelhamid was inspired to reach out to other young Muslim women and develop this program. The WISE program, which she began at age 17, emphasizes the promotion of self-defense, entrepreneurship and leadership skills.

“[WISE] is really all about empowering other people so they feel like they have the tools, the skills and resources to be able to make a difference,” said Abdelhamid in a video series put forth by the College covering young alumni solving pressing global issues.

As an International Politics and Economics major at the College, Abdelhamid’s studies greatly influenced her future goals for WISE. “As a political science student, I’ve seen how to leverage economic systems to empower disenfranchised communities,” said Abdelhamid in the video. “In seeing that, I wanted to use WISE as a space where these young Muslim women can gain the skills that they need to be able to access these different economic institutions.”

While at the College, Abdelhamid worked with Jonathan Isham, Professor of Economics and Director for the Center of Social Entrepreneurship (CSE), along with other members of the CSE to develop a 100-page course outline that would become the basis for WISE’s basic program, Mentee Muslimah. The 13-session program is taught to around 50 13-17 year-old women in Manhattan each summer. Abdelhamid used the skills she learned from the CSE, like sustainability and scalability, as well as a grant from the Center to expand her vision for WISE.

“What makes Rana really unique that we saw in her is that this is an issue that is connected to her identity and it drives her all the time,” said Heather Neuwirth ’08, Associate Director of the Center for Social Entrepreneurship, in the Associated Press article published Dec. 31. “She took what could have been an experience that could have shut her down, she really realized the power in that and I think the way that she connects to others is deeply caring.”

Over the past five years, WISE has educated hundreds of young women and has grown rapidly. WISE now has chapters in Union City, New Jersey, Washington, Dallas, Madrid and Edinburg. Abdelhamid is planning on developing programs in Chicago, Dublin and Istanbul. She has also taken steps to increase the program’s scope to include women of other religions.

Abdelhamid said in an article on the genUN website, “Whether it’s through involvement with the [United Nations Association of the United States of America] or with a local community organization, our time to make change, as youth, is right now and we have so many tools to do so.”