Her Story
A NAME, AND THE MOTHER WHO CARRIES IT
The foundation is named after a mother who never went to school. Her son wrote this.
Amneh is an Arabic name that means safety, reassurance and trust. It is the word people reach for when they want to describe the feeling of being held steady.
For the foundation, Amneh is the feeling every girl deserves while she pursues her education and her ambitions: the confidence that she is supported, that her path is possible, and that she will not be walking it alone.
Amneh is a feeling before it is a name.
A line drawing of Amneh, the founder’s mother.
The Mother
My mother never sat in a classroom. Neither did my father.
She talked about school the way people talk about a place they were always meant to reach and never did. Not bitterly. She would mention it in passing, while doing something else, and then move on. I understood much later that she was describing a door she had stood outside all her life, and that she had decided none of her children would ever stand outside it.
There were five of us. Every one of us finished our education. I have thought about how. She did it, daily, in a hundred small decisions nobody wrote down. She could not check our homework. She checked everything else. She built a house where studying was the most important thing happening in it, and made that look like nothing at all.
She never called herself a teacher. She is the best one I have had.
My father held the same conviction in his quieter way, and it showed up mostly as this: he never once suggested that any of us stop. That sounds like a small thing. It was not.
This foundation carries my mother’s name while she is here to see what it does. It is not a memorial, and it is not a tribute to something that has finished. This is not simply a foundation built in memory. It is gratitude transformed into opportunity.
Mohammad, her youngest son
She never went to school. She made sure five of us did.
The Legacy
Most legacies are written afterwards. This one was started early, on purpose, while my mother is here to watch what her conviction turns into.
What she gave us was never only the fees. It was someone paying attention, someone expecting something, someone who had already decided that we would finish. That is what Amneh tries to hand forward: the money, yes, but also a person in your corner and a path to somewhere after the degree. A scholarship ends. What it makes possible does not.
Every girl should have the safety to believe in what she can become. Amneh exists to create that safety.