A session on social entrepreneurship in the Arab world highlighted the work of the Synergos Institute’s work with its new Arab World Social Innovators Program.

George Khalaf, director of the Middle East and North Africa programs run by Synergos, reported on the program’s experiences since it was created in October 2007. It is the organization’s first formal foray into that region.

Since then, 22 “social innovators” from Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, and the Palestinian territories have received money and management assistance to help them carry out and expand existing community-development and social-justice projects.

Mr. Khalaf said the 22 grant recipients were chosen from among 200 applicants, about half of whom were women. He said that he was disappointed that only four women received the money, but that he hoped women in the Arab world would benefit through the work of participants in the program.

One of the recipients, Ali Abu Awwad, a Palestinian activist, spoke on the panel. Mr. Awwad began Al-Tariq (the Way), a group in the Palestinian territories that incorporates the teaching of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi on non-violent resistance and promotes dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians.

Mr. Awwad told pertinent parts of his life story, including his experience growing up in a refugee camp and learning that an Israeli soldier had killed his brother at a checkpoint near his village. Also, Mr. Awwad himself was shot in the leg by an Israeli settler and spent four years in prison during the first intifada.

After these losses, he said he started out “with a victim mentality.” But his mindset changed, he said: “It’s easy to grow up with hatred. But ultimately it’s poisoning your body, mind, and life. “

Mr. Awwad spoke to the difficulties of working with a nonprofit group that advocates nonviolence in a region rife with deep ethnic, political, and social enmities, and the challenge of “building a social movement without hatred, without violence.”

He also works closely with the Parents Circle-Families Forum, a grass-roots group of bereaved families who have lost family members to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and promote reconciliation as an alternative to continued violence in the region.

The Oslo accords and other peace efforts have yet to include community members, said Mr. Awwad, and that must change if the situation is to evolve.

“Peace will be based on inclusion,” he said, “when the killing of every human being is a crime.”