SEE CHANGE

SEE Change was an EU Madad-funded program designed to build a working social entrepreneurship ecosystem in Lebanon's Bekaa, North Lebanon, and Mount Lebanon regions. It ran on a three-organization implementation: COSV alongside Oxfam Great Britain and the Beyond Reform and Development / Irada Group, with funding routed through the EU's Madad Trust Fund in response to the Syrian refugee crisis and Lebanon's deepening economic collapse. The project's premise was that the social economy, the network of social enterprises and the support organizations around them, could absorb pressure that neither traditional employment markets nor humanitarian aid alone could handle. The project ran from September 2020 to September 2023 on a budget of EUR 2.3 million, and I joined COSV in 2022, in its final year.

The communities it served were mixed. Lebanese, Palestinian, and Syrian men and women in three regions where the labour market had narrowed sharply and where refugee and host populations were sharing increasingly fragile services. The project's theory of change was specific. Identify Social Enterprises (SEs) that were already operating or could be started; build out the Social Entrepreneurship Support Organizations (SESOs) that train, advise, and accredit them; then knit those two layers into a functioning ecosystem with skills transfer between local Lebanese SESOs and international counterparts. Underneath that work ran a slower stream of policy advocacy, since social entrepreneurship in Lebanon had no clean legal or institutional framework at project start. Success meant SEs that survived past the funding period, SESOs that kept operating after the international partners stepped back, and a policy conversation that did not reset to zero when the project closed.

On SEE Change, my work concentrated on the documentation that made the funded businesses legible to the European Union. Every legal and financial document the funded Social Enterprises produced passed through me in some form: contracts, invoices, receipts, powers of attorney, audit-supporting paperwork. I translated them, reviewed them for accuracy against the originals, and flagged inconsistencies before they reached the financial compliance teams. The narrative reports COSV submitted to the EU, describing what each funded business actually did, passed through me in both languages, because the donor reads one version and the local enterprise the other, and the two have to say the same thing.

The discipline SEE Change taught was that working across three implementing organizations, three regional contexts, and three first languages required more than translation. The work was alignment, with translation as one of its mechanisms. Same logframe, same indicators, same EU compliance grid; three different interpretations of what any given commitment actually meant on the ground. Holding meaning steady across institutional and cultural boundaries is the same problem The Architect AI's release pipeline addresses now, with language models in the place of partner organizations and output stages in the place of cultural boundaries. What is being protected is the same: that what gets shipped at the end means what it claimed to mean at the start.