كل عائلة لديها قصة

Every Family
Has a Story

Capturing multigenerational narratives across the Middle East to reveal our shared humanity and build pathways toward peace.

Three generations.
Nine countries.
One shared story.

The Generations Project is a nonprofit social enterprise that documents how families across the Middle East have experienced conflict, migration, and resilience over three generations. We capture their stories — not as geopolitical data points, but as deeply human accounts of raising children, pursuing education, building homes, and holding onto hope.

What we find, again and again, is that the values connecting these families — security, family, education, dignity — are far more alike than different. Our work makes those connections visible, undeniable, and permanent.

UAE
الإمارات
Iran
ایران
Syria
سوريا
Palestine
فلسطين
Saudi Arabia
السعودية
Israel
ישראל
Egypt
مصر
Jordan
الأردن
Afghanistan
افغانستان

How stories become
engines for peace

01

Convene the Youth

We bring together the youngest generation from each family for a three-day design workshop. They co-create the interview frameworks, ensuring cultural authenticity and building personal investment in the process. These are not passive subjects — they are co-creators.

02

Capture the Stories

Each young participant interviews their parents and grandparents, capturing the family's arc across three generations. Interviews are professionally filmed, translated across Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, and English, and curated into a growing digital archive organized by theme and country.

03

Exchange and Expand

All generations come together for a four-day multigenerational exchange — sharing stories, discovering common ground, and building lasting relationships across national lines. The methodology is codified into a toolkit for universities and peace-building organizations worldwide.

Governments negotiate borders and ceasefires. We repair the human fabric beneath.

The Generations Project
Pilot Impact

What one cohort creates

9
Multigenerational family stories documented and permanently preserved
27+
Individuals across three generations engaged in cross-cultural exchange
9
Young leaders with lasting peer relationships across the region
A growing public archive and replicable methodology for the world

Built by people with skin in the game

LS
Levi Schiffer
Co-Founder

Stanford '29, International Relations & Middle Eastern Studies. Spent a year at King's Academy in Jordan and a summer in Marrakech, Morocco through the State Department's NSLI-Y program.

S
Selma Ahmed
Co-Founder

Stanford '29. Expertise in digital humanities and storytelling. Afghan American with a personal connection to multigenerational displacement. Leading the design of the digital archive, media production pipeline, and replicable toolkit.

JB
Joni Bessler
Co-Founder

Stanford BSc, University of Chicago MBA. 40-year career as Partner at Booz Allen Hamilton/Strategy& serving clients globally. Co-founded Full Steam Forward, a STEAM enrichment nonprofit for girls from under-resourced communities. Has lived and worked across the US, Israel, Singapore, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, and China. Speaks English, Spanish, Mandarin, and Hebrew.

תיקון עולם

Repairing the World

The Generations Project is rooted in the Jewish value of Tikkun Olam — the moral imperative to repair what is broken. Few things are more broken today than the human relationships across the Middle East. We believe that the act of truly listening to another family's generational story — across language, nationality, and historical grievance — is itself an act of repair. Humanity's oldest technology, storytelling, deployed to heal humanity's deepest wounds.

Join the project

We are seeking families, student collaborators, media partners, and supporters who believe that stories can change the world. The pilot launches in 2026.