Join us in changing lives and building communities.
Born amidst war, Amalna Foundation continues to deliver life-saving assistance to at-risk populations, particularly in hard-to-reach and high risk areas.
AMALNA FOUNDATION
Amalna is the Arabic word for “our hope.” Amalna was first founded in 2018 in response to the appeal for support from communities experiencing humanitarian crises in Iraq and the Middle East. Since then, it has grown worldwide by affiliation with local communities.
Amalna Foundation’s work focuses on psychosocial support for war-affected families, women empowerment, education for vulnerable children and youth, and rights advocacy, primarily in crisis
locations like Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine.
Our vision
Our vision is a society that protects the vulnerable, empowers communities, ensures access to education and information for the marginalized, and defends the rights and dignity of all human beings.
Our mission
Our mission is to build programs on transformational education, inclusive research, information dissemination, and community engagement.
KOI INSTITUTE
The acronym KOI stands for Kapwa/Kindred Outreach and Information. The KOI Institute serves as a popular education, training, and community research resource, emphasizing cultural organizing frameworks, methodologies, and tools. It spearheads Amalna’s mission in the United States. KOI Institute’s goal is to contribute to the building and strengthening of the skills and capacities of community organizers using the racial justice and cultural activist lens, primarily utilizing integrated arts and decolonizing methodologies of the Theatre of the Oppressed.
Kapwa is a Filipino word that refers to the unity of the self with others. According to Virgilio Enriquez, founder of the Sikolohiyang Pilipino (Filipino Psychology) movement, kapwa is a “recognition of shared identity, an inner self shared with others”. (Enriquez, 1992)*. It implies a moral obligation to treat another as an equal fellow human being, an acknowledgement of community and shared destiny.
* Enriquez, V.G. (1992). From Colonial to Liberation Psychology. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press.
KOI INSTITUTE'S CORE PROGRAMS
Activist Kapwa Theatre (AKT) Program
This program shall utilize the core organizing principles, methodologies, and tools of cultural-activist work in collaboration with other community organizations and their home-grown concretization of Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed for educating, mobilizing, and organizing their communities and networks.
Program activities will focus on using theatre as a means of political activity (e.g., Legislative theatre) where community members engage deeply with their elected officials on issues that are most pressing to them. This program will be implemented in partnership with Chicago-based groups such as the Center for Immigrant Resources and Community Arts (CIRCA-Pintig), the Filipino American Council of Greater Chicago (FACGC), as well as individual educators, researchers, and students from the University of Illinois Chicago and the University of Michigan.
The AKT program shall build upon the long history of collaborations among these groups and individuals to continue uplifting the voices of the marginalized communities that they have served for decades, particularly the immigrant workers, elderly, youth, women, children, disabled, and LGBTQ segments.
A2-STEM-LEAF (Arts Approach to Science-Technology-Math Learning Enrichment Across Families) Program
This program shall utilize the foundational elements of cultural work, i.e., using the integrated-arts approach to interrogate, analyze, and challenge assumptions about our communities or the larger world around us and creatively figure out solutions to problems confronted by our families, neighborhoods, or society, in promoting learning enrichment in the STEM (Science-Technology-Engineering-Math) fields among marginalized communities and families.
Program activities will focus on using innovative methodologies pioneered by organizations such MathXplorers (mathxplorers.org) and CIRCA-STEAM (circasteam.science) such as storytelling for developing critical thinking and joy in learning complex math and science concepts.
Technology for Equity in Community Health (TECH)
This program shall focus on promoting technology access and literacy around disability justice and community health especially among the underserved segments of the disabled, veterans, and survivors of war and gun violence. Building upon Amalna’s extensive work in war-torn areas in Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine since 2018, the program shall collaborate primarily with Amalna’s NGO partners in Europe, the Middle East, and the U.S., and Avatar VRXG Consulting, a technology social enterprise joint venture, with expertise on developing virtual reality software for physical and occupational rehabilitation and mental health.
