Stitched with Purpose

There is a bag sitting on a table somewhere in Accra right now. It was made by hand, stitch by careful stitch, by a woman in the West Bank of Palestine. She made it at home, between the school run and dinner, between one responsibility and the next. She never met the person who would carry it. She may never know that it travelled across two continents to become part of a gathering of young global leaders. But she made it with full attention, full skill, and something that I can only describe as insistence: the insistence that what she produces matters, that she is a maker, not a recipient.

On Names and What They Mean 

When I first spoke to Sulaima, co-founder of Ibtikar (ابتكار), a Palestinian non-profit organisation, and one of the founding participants of the Global Solvers Accelerator (GSA), I asked her to start at the beginning: the name.

  “Ibtikar is an Arabic word that means innovation, creativity, or the act of bringing something new into existence.”    

She explained that when she and her co-founders were deciding what to call the organisation, they kept coming back to the women and young people they were working with daily. People who were routinely described in the language of deficit: what they lacked, what had been taken from them, what they could not access.

   “Many of the women and young people we work with are often viewed through the lens of what they lack. They lack jobs, they lack resources, they lack opportunities, freedom of movement. But that was never what we saw. For us, we saw creativity. Constantly, we saw people really finding solutions and adapting and creating opportunities where none seemed to exist, and they were building hope from very limited resources.”

This reframing, from deficit to capacity, is not rhetorical. It is structural. It shapes how Ibtikar hires, who sits on its board, and how it measures success. When Sulaima tells me that several of the organisation’s current board members and staff began as programme beneficiaries, she is describing something that most civil society organisations aspire to and few actually achieve.

A Small Organisation With a Long Reach 

Founded in 2018 and officially registered in 2019, Ibtikar operates with a team of seven staff, the majority of whom are women, supported by a Board of Directors where five of seven members are women, and most are under 35. Around this core, there is a wider network of trainers, youth leaders, volunteers, artisans, and business coaches that Ibtikar has developed over four years of sustained community work in the southern West Bank.

Their work falls across three interconnected areas: social entrepreneurship and leadership, socioeconomic empowerment, and community resilience. Like virtually all civil society organisations in the region, they have navigated the uncomfortable reality of project-based funding, working with partners including the French Consulate, UNRWA, Aflatoon, and Mercy Relief, while simultaneously trying to build structural independence.

“In Palestine, many organisations spend a significant amount of their energy securing resources simply to continue surviving and serving their communities.”

This pressure has pushed Ibtikar toward something genuinely interesting: a move toward organisational self-sufficiency. They have built two internal revenue-generating departments. The first is the artisanal department, which produces the handcrafted bags that have now reached international markets. The second is a youth business coaching department whose trained mentors work independently across the West Bank, collectively covering 24% of the organisation’s operational budget and supporting around 120 people in employment. It is a practical, unromantic, and deeply considered response to structural dependency.

“Our greatest asset has never been funding; it has always been the trust we have built with the communities we serve.”

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 What the GSA Gave Her and What It Could Not 

Sulaima joined the very first cohort of the Global Solvers Accelerator (GSA). Being part of that founding batch has always felt significant to those of us who facilitated the program. These were the participants who helped define what GSA could be before we fully knew ourselves. Speaking with her now, five years on, I was curious what she actually carried from that experience, and what she felt it could not offer.

Her answer was characteristically precise.

“When I joined the first GSA cohort, I expected to learn tools, methodologies, and frameworks, and I really did learn a lot. But what stayed with me is something entirely different. For the first time, I found myself in a community of people from different corners of the world who were all trying, in their own ways, to serve their people and solve difficult problems.”

What she describes, the relief of shared uncertainty, is something I have heard echoed across multiple cohorts, and it is why peer community, not curriculum, remains the thing GSA participants talk about most after they conclude the program. The loneliness of social change work is real and underacknowledged. Sulaima put it plainly:

“Running a social impact organisation can make you feel lonely. There are moments when everyone sees the achievements and events, but very few see the uncertainty behind them and the hardships it takes to reach where you are today.”

But she was equally honest about the limits. Most leadership frameworks assume a baseline of stability: they are built for challenge, not for collapse.

“The years that followed taught me lessons I think no classroom could teach. They taught me how to lead when all the plans are collapsing and how to continue when certainty disappears, which is exactly where we are navigating nowadays. And how to make decisions when there are no good options, or only less harmful ones.”

There is a line in this interview that I keep returning to:

“I think GSA helped me become a better social entrepreneur, but Palestine taught me how to become a resilient one.”

It is a generous thing to say, and a clear-eyed one. Leadership, she concluded, is much less about having answers and more about continuing to move forward when answers are unavailable, scarce, or unattainable.

The Bags, and the Women Who Made Them

For the Global Solvers Co-Lab 2026, our annual GSA in-person gathering this year hosted in Accra, the Melton Foundation commissioned Ibtikar to produce a set of handstitched bags for participants. When I asked Sulaima to walk me through the process of making them, she redirected immediately.

“I’ll tell you about the women, because for me, this is the most important part of the story.”

106 women, working from home

All 106 women working with Ibtikar’s artisanal department work from home. This was a practical adaptation: safety concerns around commuting due to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in both Gaza and the West Bank and the presence of armed Israeli soldiers in several places have made in-person assembly unfeasible. But it has also become a design principle. Women do not need to sacrifice their family lives or compromise their safety to earn. Ibtikar sources the raw materials, specific colours and quality, and delivers them along with the design via local shipping. Finished pieces are collected the same way.

“Depending on the design, an average bag can take anywhere from two to four days. What many people don’t realise is that the process begins long before the embroidery. First, we select and prepare the material internally, then measure and cut the fabric. Then comes the sewing and assembly of the pieces: handles, pockets, lining, and finishing details. All embroidery is handmade stitch by stitch; there is no machine work here. Every bag is carefully checked by a quality control employee.”

Behind every single bag, she explained, there is a production line of three or four women, each with her own circumstances, her own story.

For the Melton Foundation order specifically:

“We paid extra attention because we knew they were travelling internationally and would represent both the women who made them and our organisation.”
An additional artisan was brought in specifically to print the Foundation logo.

More than a bag

I asked what the work of these women means to her. Her answer is the one I will carry with me longest.

“When people talk about Palestine, they often imagine suffering. I don’t deny suffering exists, but what I witness every day is much more complicated. I meet women carrying extraordinary responsibilities, navigating financial uncertainty and all the daily pressures of life here, yet they somehow find the energy to create, produce, and make art. When I sit with them, they rarely spend time talking about what they have lost. They talk about what they are going to do next.”

And then, on the bags themselves:

“They are important because they generate income, but they represent something deeper: dignity. They refuse to beg for money. They bring their skills to produce something to sell. They remind me and the world that they are producers, creators, and contributors. Every bag carries part of someone’s story, stitched together over days and weeks.”

Beyond the Binary

There is a tendency, in how stories about Palestinian people are received internationally, to force them into a frame: suffering and resilience, peril and hope, loss and survival.

These are not untrue, but they are insufficient. What Sulaima describes and what Ibtikar embodies is something more textured, more ordinary, and in some ways more radical. It is the insistence on being seen as full human beings: as makers, thinkers, organisers, entrepreneurs, board members, mothers, daughters, business coaches.

Not as symbols of a crisis.  I came away from this conversation not with a feeling of inspiration in the easy sense, but with something more like recognition.

Recognition of what it means to build carefully, over years, in conditions that were never designed to support what you are trying to do. To hold an organisation together not through funding cycles or frameworks, but through trust. To name yourself after your own creative capacity rather than after what has been taken from you.

The bag in Accra has a logo on it and very intricate hand-made embroidery. It has handles, lining, a pocket, and finishing details. It was made by at least three or four women. It took days to make and weeks to ship. It will be held by a young leader who is, in their own corner of the world, also trying to figure out how to make something that matters.

I think that counts.

Ibtikar (ابتكار) is based in the southern West Bank, Palestine. To learn more about their work or support the artisanal department, visit ibtikar.ps