Youth & Civic Engagement
Why windows
The name Shabebik means windows. It was chosen deliberately, and it still describes how the organisation reads a crisis.
Published · Shabebik Association
Behind every closed door, there are windows opening.
That sentence is the reason the association is called Shabebik — windows. It is not decoration. It is a working assumption about what to do when the obvious route is shut.
Lebanon has given people a great deal of practice at closed doors. What we have watched since 2018 is that communities rarely stop at the door. They find the opening nobody had catalogued: the neighbour with a workshop, the teacher who will hold a class in a living room, the pharmacist who knows exactly which families have stopped collecting their prescriptions.
Our job is usually not to invent the opening. It is to notice it early, and then to put weight behind it — funding, coordination, a partner, a room, a legal form — so that something improvised can become something dependable.
That is also why we resist arriving with a finished plan. A plan written elsewhere tends to see only the door.
What this means in practice
Across our six areas of work — community development, women’s leadership, youth and civic engagement, economic inclusion, health and social protection, and humanitarian response — the same pattern repeats. The most durable results have started from something a community was already doing, quietly, before anyone offered to help.
We would rather strengthen that than replace it.
If you know of an opening we should be looking at, tell us.