By Moniza Khokhar, in partnership with Seeds of Peace | Ramy Nagy, is an emerging leader that understands the requirement to adapt, lead and influence people towards a common goal. As a member of the Young Leadership Committee’s Board of Directors for Seeds of Peace, Ramy co-chairs significant fundraising and awareness initiatives, works with other board members and YLC members on growing the YLC through expertise and volunteerism. Ramy also founded Beena, which is a platform for inspiring projects that encourage participation, innovation and making a difference in the world. Beena means “by us” as in “made by us” in Egyptian colloquial Arabic. Ramy took his experiences with and then created MADEO, which is a unique branding and design firm that has been helping clients since 2006 in the Middle East and the United States. We got a chance to speak to him.
Elan: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself professionally?
RN: I have always been passionate about human-centered design and its ability to drive change. This passion shaped my career so far, which always focused on trying to help companies and organizations grow successfully through design thinking. I worked in New York and Hollywood at a number of film and marketing firms, which shaped my view on the importance of multidisciplinary teamwork for creating innovative projects. I worked on the creative development teams responsible for marketing strategies for clients such as Warner Brothers, Disney and Universal Studios. After directing video, design and branding projects, I founded MADEO a creative firm with teams in Cairo and New York. MADEO’s collaborative multidisciplinary teams work to design and produce human-centered brands, ideas, ads, websites, brochures, videos, films, events, new forms of experiences and sometimes even entirely new businesses for our clients.
Elan: You founded the Beena Project. Tell us about it.
RN: Beena means “by us” as in “made by us” in Egyptian colloquial. Beena was inspired by the positive collaborations that made the Egyptian peaceful revolution a role model in participation and collaboration for social change. We believe that collaborating is much better than succeeding alone. Beena is the place to explore innovative collaborations from around the world in art, business, culture, design, technology and other things that push our days forward.
Beena was founded in 2011, but is made possible by daily collaborative teams working around the clock to make Beena something special. Beena is more than a website. There are BeenaTalks and other interesting things we’re making to push innovative collaborations forward.
Elan: Why was it so important to provide a platform like Beena at a time like this?
RN: I started Beena the same day that Mubarak stepped down. I had a feeling that what will come next will be an overwhelming amount of news everyday about political changes in the country, which a year later seems to be still the case, and with that, I didn’t want to lose sight of the innovative projects that are coming out. I wanted to a way to share these projects with other people to be inspired and I wanted space for them to know that these kind of projects can be important and not everything will have to be about politics or make big headlines to matter.
Elan: As someone who is well connected with the Egyptian youth and work with them closely, what are some lessons that you hope to get across to the future leaders of Egypt?
RN: The future leaders of Egypt are today’s youth; maybe not in the coming election, but ultimately it is today’s young leaders that will be in positions of power in the coming years. The one message that I would care to get across is that the more we collaborate with other countries, communities and a diverse group of people the faster we will innovate, be influenced and influence others in the world.
Elan: What is one of the greatest challenges you’ve had to face as an entrepreneur and activist?
RN: The greatest challenge for me as an entrepreneur is sustaining an idea, as a project through months of ups and downs in the country and for the people working on it. A great idea is always easy to start, but gets very challenging to sustain, without losing sight of what was great about it from the first place.