BEIRUT: More than 100 strangers are sending Zeina Abi Assy to New York City to study creative writing. ?Right now, I have 182 donors and 95 percent are Lebanese and Arab,? Abi Assy told The Daily Star Sunday, just hours before her monthlong, online fundraising campaign ended. ?I?m very, very, very overwhelmed. It feels like I belong to a beautiful community, I didn?t know how they would accept this.?
By ?this? Abi Assy meant crowd funding, a tool startup companies, nonprofits and, increasingly, university students are using to pool money through online donations. Crowd funding has become more popular in the country and region and websites have cropped up to serve the Middle East specifically.
Abi Assy, a 24-year-old from Jbeil, set a goal of $25,000 to fund the first year of her master?s program in creative writing at The New School in Manhattan. Monday morning, at the close of her campaign on crowd funding website Indiegogo, she had surpassed her target with a total of $25,145 and 200 donors.
For Abi Assy, the decision to raise money for her pricey master?s program in the United States came out of last resort, one she and those who helped her said could easily have flopped. ?It has been two months of tears and encouragement and happiness,? she said, as her campaign, with hours to go still needed 15 percent, or $3,750.
The draw of her campaign has been her emphasis on writing nonfiction, and using her future books to tell the stories of Beirut and Lebanon to a worldwide audience, she said. She is primarily interested in dispelling the myths about Lebanon while telling the stories of everyday life.
Her purpose comes at a timely moment, as Lebanon has crept back into international headlines after the war raging in next door Syria has led to a string of crises and security incidents here.
?I come from a group of friends where not two of us come from the same religion or the same sects,? she said. ?We?re not always dodging bullets. We live very regular lives.?
?Maybe we can be understood in a different way,? she added.
She decided to pursue writing in English because it?s the language in which she learned to write creatively. With a target audience outside the Arab-speaking world, she also sees English as a way to transmit her message as widely as possible, though she would love to develop her creative writing skills in Arabic.
To go to school in the United States, where university tuition is notoriously high and scholarships for foreign students are scarce, Abi Assy will have to pay a total of $50,000 over the next two years. Her decision to raise that money through crowd funding received its share of criticism, she said.
?Some said it?s like begging or it?s juvenile, that I?m taking the easy way to get money,? she said. ?Some people say I don?t deserve it because there are bigger things to give money to.?
Critics have lobbed the same criticism at university students raising money for tuition in other parts of the world, but that hasn?t stopped the trend from spreading.
Over the past year, Indiegogo has seen a 240 percent increase in campaigns in the education category, company spokeswoman Cara Morgan said.
Indiegogo declined to release specific numbers for the Middle East, but Morgan said, ?the platform has seen campaigns stemming from many countries in the region across creative, cause-related and entrepreneurial categories.?
Abi Assy became interested in crowd funding after a Lebanese friend studying at New York University in Manhattan used the fundraising platform to finance a documentary film project.
Locally grown crowd funding websites have also cropped up, including Aflamnah and Zoomaal, though most of the campaigns through these sites have an entrepreneurial focus. One major exception is a campaign by Lebanese Arabic rock band Mashrou? Leila to fund their next album on Zoomaal.
Most of the largest international crowd funding sites still have barriers that prevent Lebanese campaigns from succeeding. For example, the majority of crowd funding sites Abi Assy researched required PayPal, an online payment service that doesn?t operate in the country, said Rawane Khalil, a friend who helped run Abi Assy?s Indiegogo campaign.
Khalil said they ended up with Indiegogo because it was the only site they found that could accommodate Lebanese credit card numbers.
The success has awed Khalil, who said she was unsure about the outcome in the beginning.
?The Lebanese society is not used to it at all. It defies the Lebanese mentality,? she said. ?In the beginning, it was a 50-50 thing. I thought they would get a very good sum of money. But even anonymous people starting giving money, a couple people no one knows gave $500 each.?
About $7,000 was raised through offline donations that the pair later added online. The volume of these donations showed that even if people didn?t have credit cards or were wary of donating online ? something foreign for many Lebanese ? the campaign site was able to successfully promote her cause, Khalil said.
Abi Assy has inspired others to use crowd funding as a way to raise money for their projects, she said.
?A lot of people that don?t know Zeina and are not from our circle of friends ? they say maybe we should start one,? Khalil said. ?[Crowd funding] is like a way of giving power to people who don?t have a lot of money ? they can make things happen, anyone can help.?
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