GV Board Elections 2017: Rawan Gharib
Hello, beautiful minds and elegant souls of the world, my fellow GVers :)
Rawan and her brother in Cairo International Book Fair
My name is Rawan Gharib; I am one of the Arabic Translation Managers, based in Cairo. I am also an author with a focus on Latin America/Middle East cultural nodes. I have also had the recent privilege of working with Rising Voices on the Mother Language Meme Challenge campaign.
I have been puzzled by the charm of communication, and the cruelty resulted from the lack of it since I can remember. I belong to a generation who stayed suspended and open, since that moment where the Egyptian revolution sparked in the 25th of January, longing for the new and the fulfilling. For example, the new having fun trend at that time were International/National Days where each country could get a showy corner of its culture.
I remember my friends and me enjoying the lightness of safely lost strangers, who kept dumbly and passionately jumping around, tasting the food and trying customs on, with many beautiful, loud folk songs in the background all in harmony. Whenever we got tired, we could rest home near the African corners.
A few years later, as an avid Internet surfer, I stumbled upon Global Voices. It made me feel the same way, yet more attentively and mindfully with an honest and keen willingness to know others. I quickly became a frequent visitor and soon after (September 2015) I decided to volunteer as a Spanish/English into Arabic translator.
I am running for the GV Board Elections as a volunteers’ representative because it would be a great opportunity to know and represent each and every one of you in a better way. Representing volunteers is about sharing our thoughts together to keep Global Voices the ideal platform representing a real image of our world, when it gets all confusing and weary. I am looking forward to sharing this with you.
Let’s keep shaking walls and building bridges!
14 comments
Loved it! “Let’s keep shaking walls and building bridges!”
Good luck, Rawan :)
Gracias, preciosa :)
Best of luck to you too!
Happy to see a candidate from Arabic Lingua and MENA :)
<3
Definitely you have my vote Senhorita
What an honour, Senhor! :)
Good luck, Rawan.
Thanks, Aparna! :)
Hi Rawan – here is a question that I’m posing to all of the candidates, as a way to encourage discussion during the last couple of days of campaigning:
1.) If you are elected board member, what would be the most critical challenge facing Global Voices that you would make your top priority to help address over the next three years? And why do you feel like addressing this challenge is especially important for our community?
Thanks, Eddie!
Great question.
I believe one of the main challenges that’s facing GV is the general atmosphere of questioning the role of media and whether it does help framing facts clearly or not. If elected Volunteers’ Represtative, I’ll focus on restoring faith in GV multisensory and multilayered role (bridging, advocacy, reporting, full covering, etc..) and the vitality of it as I consider it the most important motive for any GV volunteer. To make this happen I’m encouraging more networking across different Lingua teams of editors and translators, as well as authors, more conversations, more brain storming sessions in a warmer environment that enables concerns sharing and free expressing.
Also, linking personal volunteer motives (highlighted in volunteering application forms) to GV’s vision and mission is important to sustain the value of individuality and seize it to a collective sense.
I’ve also noticed several cases of volunteers’ applications flooding right after publishing and sharing a story that resonates with them, reflecting their current situation or the way they feel about it (mostly happens with The Bridge posts) very well and very accurately. This toohas to be taken in consideration. In short, I’ll focus on the personal/regional/global balance equation to emphasis GV’s role and help amplifying it.
Thanks for your reply, Rawan.
Hi Rawan,
Thank you for this sweet, inspiring introduction! Following Eddie’s lead, I’m asking all the candidates a question too.
Do you have any thoughts on how Global Voices can scale the trust we’ve built internally in our community to larger audiences outside of our community, so we can make more of the world look like GV?
I don’t think there are any right or wrong answers to this question. In fact, I’m not sure I have answers myself (!), but would love to hear any thoughts that it inspires.
Good luck in the election!
Best,
Sahar
Hi Sahar :)
I think GV is already doing this just being GV. It’s hard trying to scale the spirit of GV to larger audiences without sounding a tiny little bit preachy, if you know what I mean. We do attract passionate volunteers everyday who get inspired by this spirit and who are willing to share it, so in turn, being a GVer is an act of scaling this spirit wider in itself. Let me quote Marcell Shehwaro as she once spoke this out perfectly when she wrote “What Christ is being born among us, when we want to “follow” everything except for the star that leads to the manger?”. This star could be Global Voices or any other entity that adheres certain human values and ethical standards we’re longing for and have already been seizing them in the GV community.
Thanks for the great question!
Thanks for the reply! Best of luck!