This is a short story about the Tamkeen Process that we, Tamkeen Community Foundation for Human Development (Tamkeen), are undergoing. The communities we have the privilege to have a deeply human and co-creative relationship with and, to witness their Tamkeen Process, will be the ones to tell their own story.

Tamkeen was co-founded in October 2009, in Tangier, Morocco, after almost 2 years of introspection, co-reflection with a phenomenological perspective, and lived experience research of its founding members. The outcome of this process was the emergence of new questions that guided us to the co-creation of the Tamkeen Approach, the institutional model of Tamkeen, our Tamkeen team concept, the co-definition of our ethos, vision and mission as well as the co-design of initial conceptual models. A new paradigm of existing (being and becoming), thought and action rooted in human potential trust opened its window of possibilities.

We initially tried to simplify the understanding of the Tamkeen Approach by calling it an “innovative empowerment approach”. We learned that when one feels the need to add adjectives to words to give them new meanings or nuances we confuse others and ourselves and risk drifting in the illusion of paradigm shift. So we are mindful of the words we use and the evolution process of our semantic manifests how far we have allowed ourselves to go down the path of the deep understanding of what is our human potential. That process is ongoing and is generative.

The word Tamkeen تمكينis often used to translate empowerment. However, this verbal noun does not bear in its root the meaning of ‘power’ which de facto sets a dualistic dynamic (having vs not having power, giving vs taking power, gaining vs losing power). In “Tamkeen” we hear and cohere the semantically available words, hence workable and operatory, of Imkan (potential), Momkin (possible) and Imkania (possibility).

The Tamkeen approach allows the expression of the human potential, that potential being our humanity, which defines us and connects us to the whole beyond our conscious grasp. When expressed it transcends us. From and with the potential essence, all future possibilities can be co-created, manifesting in flourishing human beings, communities, societies and thriving life as a whole.

We “could have” called the evolution of the Tamkeen Process “orchestrated serendipity”, the orchestration’s nature being our belief in human potential. Its shape being the strength of our intent (nia), our love (hob) and our patience (sabr). These are the oligo-elements of the soil in which trust was able to grow: our trust in the process and in ourselves as a community as well as the trust of our partners in us, the Tamkeen Process and in their potential. We say “could have” as we now know that what can seem at times, to us and to our partners, as being of an extraordinary coincidence or even magical, to the point of leaving us speechless, is in fact emergence and dissolvence: the wondrous complex workings of life where things “arise mutually”.

Several metamorphic niches of experimentation of the Tamkeen Approach, opened up at a faster pace than originally expected. The first was through the slow building process of a relationship with a neighbourhood community, of at the time (end of 2010) approximately 350 households, in the outskirts of Tangier: Hay Zouitina community (the Olive Tree neighbourhood). We learned to co-create, with them, the conditions for the emergence of their Tamkeen Process and through their awareness of their experienced process they are now diffusing it and actively weaving the conditions for emergence with other communities. Hay Zouitina made us realise what was maybe the most meaningful: “You responded to violence with love. We had never seen that before”. The Drosos Foundation understood what is needed from a funder of social innovation and co-created the conditions by giving their trust and the means. They removed the barriers that funding partners often, willingly or unwillingly, place in the way of creativity and innovation.

Very quickly followed the second metamorphic niche of experimentation. It was the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Tetuan (2011-12) and this took the Tamkeen Approach to the education system and embedded it in a teacher training university curriculum. Then followed other niches: the Académie Régionale de l’Education et de la Formation of Tangier Tetuan Al Hoceima region (2013) where the director stated “I am convinced that without the Tamkeen Approach we will never change the education system”, a high school community in the outskirts of Tangier of 3000 students (2014) where the pedagogy director shared “with Tamkeen we were able to find the chemical formula of something that is magical. We have humanised our school”, the science community with l’Institut Scientifique in Rabat and a centre for science dissemination (2014), the Kafila teacher network (2014), the corporate community (2015), a regional development governmental agency (2016), the art and culture community (2017), an urban lab (2017), bringing together neighbourhood, art and culture and research communities, and the university community (2018).

We have learned to see with different eyes and to fathom the interconnected nature and the nature of the interdependence of these emergent processes. We have come to understand that they are context, momentum and pace sensitive. A process that seems to have stopped is only but quietened and awaiting for the right momentum to manifest itself. Each emergent process feeds back into the others (even the quietened ones) and silently co-creates the condition for systemic impact and/or the emergence of new processes.

Some processes that were budding in some of the aforementioned niches seem still and are quietened, their harmony has become faint. In fact, some were merely timid melodies. They are awaiting for the convergence of ecological factors that will define their “right momentum”. Our patience here does not translate “into sitting and waiting but foreseeing” and listening out.

Other processes, after a relatively prolonged phase of stillness seem to have undergone a quantum leap. This is the case for the regional education system and the recent expressed intention of the Minister of Education to “see the Tamkeen Approach in the education system at a national level”.

Some metamorphic niches of experimentation evolved to ecosystem’s emergence facilitation. The cocreated conditions enabling this, the models (the meta-process), are maturing and are diffusing on multiscalar and cross-sectoral levels. The shape of the diffused model adapts, changes but its essence remains untouched. By interconnecting the inner dynamics of these models and allowing new ones in response to the new contexts to arise, the conditions for the emergence of other ecosystems are co-created. We are also witnessing how two ecosystems, the education and neighbourhood systems, are merging into one learning ecosystem with our facilitation of the weaving of symbiotic relationships between school and neighbourhood communities.

What we have witnessed and experienced in the Tamkeen Process for almost 10 years has profoundly transformed us on a personal, community and institutional level. The very concepts of a team and an institution, in their classical understanding, are dissolving. It is liberating, beyond what words could ever express, to have realised that in fact, we are just learning, as a society to be what we are by weaving together the conditions for the emergence of the ecosystem of our social harmony and human flourishing. A beautiful metamorphic societal symphony!

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Tamkeen Community Foundation for Human Development June 2019 reviewed version