Amal Elsana Alhjooj

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Amal has over thirty years of experience working at the intersection of community organizing and peacebuilding in the Middle East and Canada, focusing on marginalized minorities. Her approach to grassroots work focuses on strengthening the organic linkage between academia and communities. With PLEDJ, Amal brings her vision of empowering the most marginalized communities to address intractable social problems to the local, national and international levels. 

She is the co-founder of AJEEC - Arab Jewish Center for Equality, Empowerment and Cooperation and a past co-executive director of AJEEC-NISPED. She earned her BA in social work at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, and received her MA in community organizing at McGill University, followed by a PhD in Social Work. In 2019-2020, Amal conducted postdoctoral research within the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School, focusing on the barriers faced and the strategies employed by women’s organizations. From 2020-2021, she was a postdoctoral fellow at McGill concentrating on the role and challenges of civil society organizations in conflict zones. Between 2016 and 2020 she was the Executive Director of ICAN-McGill - the International Community Action Network at McGill University, which helped to inspire the founding of PLEDJ. 

Amal is the recipient of numerous prizes, awards and distinctions. To name a few, she was chosen as one of the Genius: 100 Visionaries of the Future by the Einstein Legacy Project in 2017. In 2013, she was the recipient of the Human Rights Award by the New Israel Fund. Amal was awarded the Victor J. Goldberg Prize for Peace in the Middle East in 2011. In 2010, she was chosen by The Marker (Israeli business publication) as 1 of the 101 most influential people in Israel. Amal was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize within the framework of 1000 women in 2005. In the same year, Amal was one of the women leaders recognized by the World Association for Small and Medium Enterprises for her contributions to economic empowerment programs for Bedouin Arab women. 

Amal is the author of Hope is a Woman’s Name, a personal memoir that recounts her experiences growing up as an indigenous Bedouin Palestinian woman in Israel. While addressing the challenges of patriarchal tribal traditions and the prejudices of the Israeli state, the book explores how Amal has woven together every aspect of her intersectional identity – Bedouin, Arab, woman, Palestinian & Israeli citizen – to navigate between individual, social and political identities, and the systems of power within which they exist.