Giving back

Following the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, the family were back on the move, but the plight of Palestine remained front and centre of Al-Qattan’s mind and led him to help create The Welfare Association (Taawon) in a bid to bring funder together to collectively bolster Palestinian futures.

"He had this brilliant idea to pool resources and create a new model that would also re-emphasis Palestinian identity. "

Najwa Al-Qattan

The outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975 saw the Al-Qattan family on the move once again. Al-Qattan and Leila returned to Kuwait, while their daughters Lina and Najwa were sent to study in Switzerland and the United States (respectively), and their sons, Hani and Omar, went to boarding school in England.

Despite Al-Qattan’s prolonged separation from his homeland, he remained committed to helping Palestinians in any way he could, seeking to fill the gaps left by decades of displacement and confused international interventions.

In 1983, he and a group of other respected Palestinian intellectuals and diaspora figures (including his Edward Said and Ibrahim Abu Lughod with whom he was close friends) met in Geneva.

On the agenda was how as a diaspora they could maximise their entrepreneurial, technical, academic, and philanthropic resources, to continue to support their homeland and those trapped in refugee camps in neighbouring countries, such as Lebanon.

Out of this meeting was born The Welfare Association (Taawon), a Palestinian NGO dedicated to supporting Palestinians at home and abroad, improving their daily living conditions, through programmes spanning education, health, community development, and emergency relief.

For Al-Qattan’s eldest daughter, Najwa, Taawon was the embodiment of those lunchtime conversations in Beirut over a decade earlier. “He’d had this brilliant idea to pool resources and create a new model that would also re-emphasis Palestinian identity. He really had a vision in this sense.”

The Welfare Association

A new kind of collective philanthropy

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Ziad Khalaf directed the Human Resources Development Programme at Taawon for four years, and served as Acting Director of Programmes, before being invited by Al-Qattan to be the founding CEO of AM Qattan Foundation.

“The Welfare Association was so different to anything that had come before,” he explains. “It was really at the vanguard…. I think because of the pecularity of the Palestinian situation, being under occupation so always treading very carefully, but also with this strong diaspora influence from people who had been exposed to giving models in the West.”

From this groundbreaking beginning, Taawoon has endured and today is Palestine’s largest nonprofit organisation which has disbursed more than US$660m since its founding. According to its website, it remains “dedicated to promoting the steadfastness of Palestine and Palestinians and improving daily living conditions, services and facilities to do so”, despite the daily struggles and tragedies they live.

And there have been many of these. Indeed, not long after Taawon was formed, in 1987, a spontaneous popular uprising began in the West Bank and Gaza in response to the decades of Israeli military occupation. Now known as the First Intifada, this sustained series of non-violent protests and acts of civil disobedience lasted for six years until the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993.