Leena El-Ali is Director of Muslim-Western Relations and Middle East and North Africa programmes at Search for Common Ground (SFCG), an international non-profit organization in the field of conflict transformation with offices in 24 countries.
Since 2005, she been designing and implementing projects that promote understanding and collaboration between Muslim and Western individuals and groups, with special attention to the use of print and digital media (see www.commongroundnews.org).
She is the founder of SFCG’s programmes in Lebanon (2008) Pakistan (2009) and Yemen (2010), which seek to provide young Lebanese with the skill-set and role models necessary to transform the country into a peaceful and inclusive society by working through the Ministry of Education and through television, and to promote collaborative problem-solving in Pakistan through radio talk shows and TV and radio soap operas, respectively.
Leena grew up in Lebanon, England and Sierra Leone, and studied Economics at the American University of Beirut and Oxford University. In 1989, she began her working life in London where she spent over a decade as a fund manager and debt strategist in the City before turning to an entrepreneurial career, and in 2005 joined the world of “social” entrepreneurship through SFCG in Washington. Leena is bilingual in English and Arabic and also speaks French, Spanish and the pidgin English of Sierra Leone (Krio).
