CAIRO — A nonprofit founded by two American University in Cairo alumni has raised more than $5 million for Syrian refugees in Jordan, its founders said, as the organization marked 11 years of operation this March.

Lexi Shereshewsky and Demetri Blaisdell, who met as AUC study abroad students in 2008 and later married, launched what was then called The Syria Fund in 2013, formally registering it as a U.S. nonprofit in 2015. In 2020, they renamed it The Azraq Fund. The organization focuses its work on South Azraq, a town in northern Jordan.

The fund currently supports approximately 150 families and more than 350 students, according to its 2024 annual report, operating through a close partnership with Nachmyat Eastern Badia Cooperative, an Azraq-based charity.

The two founders said their time living in the region drove them to act. Shereshewsky studied in Cairo and lived in Damascus, where she witnessed the early days of the Arab Spring and the escalating crisis in Syria.

“By 2012, things were really bad, and many of my friends in Syria were affected,” she said.

Blaisdell said the experience left a lasting sense of obligation. “We felt like we owed a debt of gratitude to a country that had been so generous to us.”

What began as a modest goal of raising $25,000 quickly expanded. The fund ultimately raised $75,000 in its first four months. Over the following decade, as displacement became prolonged, the organization shifted from emergency relief toward long-term programming. 

Today, education accounts for roughly 80 percent of expenses, with emergency aid and administration each representing 10 percent.

“We came when people were arriving with nothing,” Shereshewsky said. “Over time the focus became how to keep students in school and help them build opportunities for the future.”

The UN estimates there are roughly 397,000 registered Syrian refugees in Jordan, nearly half of them children. Syrian refugee students face significant financial pressures that often force them to leave school and enter the workforce to support their families. 

Ebtessam, a 21-year-old Syrian university student now in her third year, said the fund’s programs helped her continue her education after fleeing to Jordan.

“When we first arrived in Jordan, we were out of school for about a year because we kept moving from place to place,” she said. “The center helped us make up for what we missed and supported us to continue our education.”

She said a scholarship made university possible. “Without the Azraq Fund, we would not have been able to go to university.” 

The organization said it has also created 23 jobs in Azraq, many of them for young Jordanian women in an area where unemployment is high. Most positions are teaching, administrative and support roles within the center.

The AUC Alumni Office, which first connected with the fund in 2017, said it is working to rebuild and expand that relationship.

Chief Alumni Engagement Officer Raymonda Raif said the office aims to highlight alumni achievements worldwide and create opportunities for collaboration.

With the organization having crossed into its second decade, its founders say they are focused on long-term sustainability amid declining humanitarian funding and a slowly changing situation on the ground in Syria.

Hiba Shbib is an integrated marketing communication junior, who wrote this article for the Media Writing class, taught by adjunct faculty member Adam Makary.

Photos courtesy of Lexi Shereshewsky.

Imagine having to flee your country in the middle of the night. What would you take with you? What would you leave behind? One thing you can never leave behind is your memories. Paradoxically, those memories are one of the hardest things to share: they leave no trace. 

Amira Ahmed (MA ’04), adjunct assistant professor and research fellow in the Department of Sociology, Egyptology and Anthropology and the Institute of Gender and Women Studies, is working to change not only how we archive migrant memory, but also how we approach refugee research as a whole. Her research examines cultural heritage-making practices along migration routes from Africa to Europe, focusing on the political agency and relationalities of migrants, refugees and their advocates. The project is called Traces of Mobility, Violence and Solidarity: Reconceptualizing Cultural Heritage Through the Lens of Migration and is multi-site collaborative research represented by AUC, Milan University in Italy, London Gold-Smith University, and Jendouba University in Tunisia.

“Traces of Mobility allows us to re-conceptualize cultural heritage from a migration perspective,” Ahmed shared. “We work with migrants and refugees to trace and document their memories, as well as the mobility and violence they might encounter during this journey. We document the solidarity they show in their displacement.”

Documenting a Shifting Heritage

The Traces program compares and analyzes the migrant experience in all stages, hosted across a multitude of countries. Egypt serves as an especially important location, as it can be both a sending, transit and receiving country for migrants. “We feel that migration is a journey,” Ahmed affirmed. “It needs to be studied in all locations and multiple locales.”

Ahmed’s own history as a migrant informs her approach to migration studies. She was born in Egypt to a Sudanese family, which has given her an important personal perspective. “As a part of the migrant community in Egypt, I already had a transnational network,” she explained. “So when I started to do interviews and focus groups, I was approached by members of the community asking us to organize events for them such as exhibitions, concerts and seminars. This started a shift in how we approached the research to be more open to the community around us and to have a participatory message. We’re giving migrants ownership and leadership over how they are expressing their own heritage.”

"We’re giving migrants ownership and leadership over how they are expressing their own heritage.”

The project is unique not only in its multi-loci infrastructure but also in its approach to heritage and memory making. For these researchers, heritage is dynamic and developing, unique to each individual and influenced by each place they have lived. It rethinks heritage through the lens of human mobility, while putting experiences of human rights violations at the center of analysis. Traces seeks to document these unique experiences through heritage archiving and mapping, as well as preserve heritage memory through cultural community-making.

“We tend to think about heritage as something that happened in the past, static, but this is actually not the case,” Ahmed explained. “Heritage is something that we have always been practicing and performing, and we continue to do it. Migration heritage is unlike the standard heritage of a region: It’s been changed through the experience of migration.”

The research seeks to place the participants front and center in the development of the Traces project.  They have ownership over how they express (the re-making) of their own heritage through a process called collaborative methodologies. 

“Collaborative methodologies are important in  migration studies,” Ahmed stated. “Research participants are not just here to share knowledge; they are an integral part of the study and should lead the development and course of the research. When it comes to migrants, it's especially crucial that knowledge building is on the grounds of equal engagement. Through these methodologies, we’re able to offer a space and strengthen the community through this project.”

Community Impact

The refugee communities have truly become the center of Traces, in both the events the project hosts and organizes as well as how migrants and refugees approach their own archive, which will be digitized for wider access. “The lives of refugees are a process that must be archived,” shared Angelina Daniel Seeka, one of the project collaborators. “Despite all the hardships they have been going through, refugees started rebuilding their lives from scratch. They started creating their own environment, their own groups — in hopes of finding a new place and forgetting what they have been through. This all must be documented.”

Seeka has been working with Ahmed to help document the stories of migrants and refugees both inside and outside of Egypt. Through the process of archiving, they’ve also developed a support network. “Within minutes, we are able to find out anything happening to refugees through social media and WhatsApp groups, allowing us to reach them and enabling them to contact us about any of our initiatives,” she shared.

Due to the way the project has developed through collaborative methodologies, a large range of events fall under the umbrella of Traces: music performances, community events and academic conferences. The French Centre for Economic, Legal and Social Studies in Sudan (CEDEJ Khartoum) conference, hosted in November 2025, invited Ahmed’s AUC class, Mobilities: Gender and Migration, to attend and learn about migrant scholarship. Students expressed a deep connection to the work being done and a more thorough understanding through hearing migrants directly share their experiences. 

“I feel satisfied because this project made a difference in so many people's lives, including our students from AUC,” Ahmed stated. “I have a good number of graduate and undergraduate students who are engaged in the project, and some of them who graduated are employed by the project.”

Traces has engaged heavily with AUC and wider migrant communities, bringing them together through unique and collaborative events. Dr. Kamal Yousif, a Sudanese migrant who has been in Cairo for three years, has brought his musical talents to AUC for Traces events. “The archival idea was to follow refugees and record their everyday life,” he shared. “The project traces the cultural heritage of refugees as they leave their homes, arrive in Egypt and build new lives there.

“As policymakers and scholars, we need to regard migrants and refugees as a resource not as a burden."

And it’s not only Sudanese refugees; there are South Sudanese, Yemeni refugees, Palestinian, Eritrean, Syrian and a lot more. Some organize their own cultural events, while at other times different nationalities collaborate and work together.”

“The collaborations are very vibrant,” Ahmed confirmed. “I really appreciate the space AUC has given us: beautiful, magnificent, historically valuable sites that we use during the project, especially the Main Campus in AUC Tahrir Square, have been home for us during the last three and a half years. Without a space like AUC, without the generosity of our staff, colleagues and administration, I don't think we would have been able to implement Traces in the way we did.”

The project’s publications and the digital archive created by Traces serves as an accessible testament to the power of refugee heritage sharing. It is the first step in what Ahmed hopes will be a wider transition in cultural understandings of migrants.

“As policymakers and scholars, we need to regard migrants and refugees as a resource not as a burden,” Ahmed concluded. “I would appreciate migration and refugee laws that enable migrants to work legally and contribute by paying taxes, just like citizens. I would also like their culture, human rights and ability to contribute to be fully recognized. I believe this is essential not only for their dignity and well-being, but also for the development of the host country they live in.”

For the first time, AUC will host a three-week public arts festival, Artozium, at the New Cairo campus. Packed with a myriad of events, Artozium brings free concerts and plays, film screenings, art workshops and exhibitions from June 10 to July 1. Interested attendees can register for these events and view the full Artozium schedule here.

Cairo’s historic art scene is centered downtown, and with more people moving to New Cairo, Artozium hopes to make AUC’s campus a hub for an emerging art scene east of the Nile, explained Wael El Mahallawy, music professor, chair of the Department of the Arts and general manager of Artozium.

“Artozium covers not only New Cairo but also the New Capital and Al Shorouk,” El Mahallawy said. “There are very few theaters, exhibition venues or galleries in this area, so the festival should attract a lot of people since they would have to travel downtown to watch these activities.”
 

Artozium features collaborations with cornerstones of Cairo’s art scene, including a screening of film shorts shown at the renowned Zawya Cinema, a performance by the Cairo Arab Choir, screenings from the Manassat Film Festival, performances by both the Reda Folklore Dance Troupe and the all-women Egyptian drum band Tablet El-Sett.

Attendees can also experiment and enhance their creative talents through art workshops on ceramics, filmmaking and puppetry, taught by AUC faculty and professionals in the field.

The festival’s name is a portmanteau of the words “art” and “symposium,” with the letter “z’” emphasizing the festival’s focus on developing Gen Z artists and creatives. 

“Our target is mainly Gen-Z, plus all the different ages,” said El Mahallawy. “We merged the five programs in our department — graphic design, visual art, film, music and theatre — into one big project.”

The festival will also feature an interactive standup comedy show by actor Tarek El Ebiary ’12 and a rousing percussion performance by the drummer Mostafa Abbas. Additionally, Artozium will display the exhibition, A Title Resembling an Unstable Image Exhibition. Curated by artist Ahmed Shawky Hassan, the installation showcases the work of emerging artists in  various mediums who explore cities as a constantly reshaping living structure.

The event will also celebrate the artists found within our AUC community. The exhibition Mashrou’ 26 showcases the creativity of the University’s 12th and largest graduating class in graphic design. Alumni will perform in the plays Gat Salima and El Masyada, with Hekaya Bel Maqloub featuring current undergraduate students and the Theatre Association will perform a showing of Neseet El Cheque. Student organizations Musicana and AUC’s Folklore Troupe will also conduct performances.

Chase F. Robinson (CASA '86)

Chase F. Robinson is the Spring 2026 undergraduate commencement speaker. Robinson has served as director of the National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, D.C since December 2018. Robinson also serves as the general editor of Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization and a member of the editorial board of Past & Present.

A highly regarded scholar of Islamic history and culture, Robinson has authored or edited nine books and more than 40 articles spanning the geographical and chronological breadth of the Islamic Middle East. His editorials and commentaries have appeared in several magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times.

Robinson previously served as president and provost of the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, as well as professor of early Islamic history in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford and chair of the department’s faculty board.

Robinson earned his bachelor's degree from Brown University and his doctorate from Harvard University, having also studied at the American University in Cairo.

Marwa Abbas '94, ’98‏

Marwa Abbas ’94, ’98 is the Spring 2026 graduate commencement speaker. She currently serves as the general manager and technology leader of IBM Northeast Africa, after joining the company in 1994. 

With over 30 years of experience in the technology industry, Abbas has held IBM leadership positions in Egypt, the Middle East and Africa, working in the Personal Computing Division, General Business Unit, ibm.com, Business Partner Organization and Channel Marketing. She was appointed the first female General Manager of IBM Egypt in 2022 and has played a pivotal role in expanding IBM’s centers of excellence, advancing AI and digital transformation initiatives.

In 2013, Abbas created and launched the first Middle East and Africa Digital Sales Center in Cairo and established the operation for the MEA Digital Sales Center servicing the MEA clients. 

Abbas serves on several boards and is a certified board director by the IFC World Bank Group. She holds a bachelor’s in computer science and an MBA from AUC.