Night was falling in Rabat, the capital of Morocco, and Ron Bruder was nervous. He wasn’t exactly sure where he was. It was a working-class part of the city, far from the usual tourist and business destinations. It was the kind of Arab neighborhood, he imagined, where Westerners could disappear without a trace.
Bruder was less worried about himself, though, than about the 10 wealthy Americans he had brought to North Africa. His fellow travelers were potential donors for his Education for Employment Foundation, set up after 9/11 as a bridge to the Islamic world. Several students had invited Bruder and the other Americans to visit their homes and have dinner with their families. While eight of the Americans were with other Moroccan students, somewhere else in the teeming neighborhoods of Rabat, the other two were steps behind Bruder as they followed a student off a crowded street no wider than an alley. Following the student up a steep, dark, narrow stairway, they soon were in a small, comfortable apartment where they were warmly greeted by the student’s parents. The American guests sat down and ate with the family, sharing traditional Moroccan chicken-and-vegetable stew from a communal tagine. The parents made it clear that they were not interested in seeing their son wage war on Americans but wanted him to live in peace and prosperity. The Moroccans and Americans found they had much in common—they wanted the same things for themselves, for their children, and for each other. Then the host brought out dessert: a beautiful Moroccan cake, elegantly served on a handmade china platter that was probably the modest household’s equivalent of the good silver.
“I’m so sorry, it’s lovely and looks delicious, but we must go meet the rest of our group,” Bruder said. “They’re waiting for us.” The mother insisted, “Take the cake with you. Serve it to everyone in your group.” She made Bruder take the platter as a gift, a token of thanks for all his foundation was doing for her son and for other young Arabs.
Ronald Bruder, 58, once described in a profile in The Economist as “a serial entrepreneur,” grew up in a mixed Italian-Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. He is chairman of the Brookhill Group, a real estate development and management firm that he founded in 1977; in recent years the firm has specialized in reclaiming “brownfield” sites, environmentally contaminated land that is redeveloped for new commercial, industrial and residential uses. When the Twin Towers fell, he was in his Midtown office, worrying about one of his two 20-something daughters who was working farther downtown that day, and it was several hours before he found out she was all right. Those sorrowful, painful, frantic hours changed Bruder’s life. “I started opening my perspective — more reading, more thinking,” he recalls. Over the following months, he studied examples in history of how economic change had led to peace. “Look at Northern Ireland in the last few years,” he says. “Things changed when people got jobs. Instead of killing each other, they are working together on making a killing.”
A private Marshall Plan
Bruder launched the Education for Employment Foundation three years ago as a private Marshall Plan for the Islamic world. He cited three trends: a youth boom in the population; high unemployment, especially among the young; and a shortage of qualified people for many skilled and professional jobs critical to economic development. “We have to reach out to these countries and help them become part of the global economy,” he says. He appointed himself CEO and committed to spending at least $1 million a year of his own money on the foundation. He also hired staff such as L. Michael Hager, a renowned expert in international development and conflict management, as president; Amir Moghadam, a specialist in international training and career management, as chief education adviser; and Jasmine Nahhas di Florio, a former United Nations lawyer specializing in developing-world public-private partnerships, as vice president in charge of strategic planning. (It was Jasmine di Florio who talked Bruder into taking the American donors into the Moroccan homes for dinner.)
Bruder first thought about building schools in the Middle East but decided to set up new programs in existing schools. He saw that millions of college graduates in the Middle East are unemployed or underemployed simply because they lack the necessary “soft skills”: They don’t know how to put together a résumé or present themselves at job interviews; they don’t have critical thinking skills or appreciate constructive criticism; they don’t understand the importance of coming to work on time or shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries when meeting a business contact; they don’t work within a team to achieve a common objective. To remedy this, the Education for Employment Foundation adapted a McGraw-Hill “Workplace Success” program, which takes two to six months to complete and relies heavily on role-playing, and Bruder set up a foundation branch at a major Jordan university to be run by Jordanians, with Jordanian instructors who had undergone training to teach the class. Several hundred unemployed college graduates have completed the professional grooming course in the past two years, and nearly all have found good jobs almost immediately.
“The results have been amazing — much more than I expected,” Bruder says. “It takes kids who weren’t working, who weren’t going to be working, and it gives them confidence and motivation.” The program has spread to other universities and to private corporations in Jordan, and a major international foundation provided the seed money to expand the program into Morocco. The students who invited Bruder and the other Americans to dinner in Rabat were all in the Moroccan Workplace Success program.
‘There's got to be local buy-in’
Bruder is using the same model, adapting programs from Harvard and Colorado State Universities, among others. He is also tapping into other foundation programs, using local trainers through local universities—and supported by local employers. Programs include a mini MBA course in Gaza, construction management classes in the West Bank, and a program in Morocco that teaches marketing and sales skills.
Bruder is a trim, compact man who likes to fend off jet lag by going for a two-hour jog as soon as he lands. He is a philanthropist, but he’s also a social entrepreneur and a businessman. He wants to create programs that will be financially supported by the employers who benefit from them — and who will present a local face for his foundation. “There’s got to be local buy-in,” he says. “Otherwise we’re just a bunch of Americans imposing our values.” Local support is particularly important in politically sensitive areas such as Palestine.
“One thing I’ve learned is that even in those parts of the world where we Americans are less than popular, our educational systems are still respected,” Bruder observes. “There may be a lot of things about us they dislike, but they respect our methodologies for educating people.”
In Egypt, Bruder learned that there is a critical shortage of nurses, yet at the same time many Egyptian university science graduates can’t find work. With the support of a company building hospitals in Egypt, Bruder’s foundation set up a two-year program to train science graduates to become licensed nurses. Meanwhile, Bruder personally is lining up jobs for the new nurses not only in the Middle East but also in U.S. hospitals, where there is a nursing shortage. In Jordan, working with a major construction company, Bruder set up a regional surveyor education program for $190,000. He is planning a job fair in the Middle East to bring together university grads who need work with employers who need managers and professional workers. He is looking at a program to produce middle managers for the Egyptian textile industry, in order to compete with China. He’s considering expanding the foundation’s work to Yemen and elsewhere.
‘I want to know the impact’
“We want replicable models that we can scale up,” Bruder says. “And we’re measuring success. We’re treating this like a for-profit because I want to know the impact. How many jobs were created? What’s the long-term effect of those jobs? What changes have we seen in the local education system as a result? We have all sorts of systems in place to monitor the students over the next 20 years. We want to see what they do with their lives.”
Bruder works full time for the foundation, the budget of which is now approaching $3 million a year, thanks to contributions from prospective employers in Egypt, Jordan, Palestine, and Morocco, and from increasing support from American and European donors. “We’re making things happen,” Bruder says. “The goal, ultimately, is to create jobs, change lives, and push other institutions to create jobs, too. Everybody has the same goals—Western, Middle Eastern, it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day you want people to be productive, you want them to work together cohesively, you want them to work in a fashion that lends itself to productivity. I don’t think these are Western values. They’re universal.”
During that trip to Morocco, Bruder had arranged a busy nine-day schedule for the prospective donors, including the top tourism sites and meetings with leading Moroccan government officials, educators, and industrialists. Bruder even arranged meetings with U.S. Ambassador Thomas Riley. But back in their hotel that evening, sampling the cake that Bruder brought back from dinner, the American donors all agreed: their visits to the students’ homes had been the highlight of the trip. “They ended up giving the foundation three times the amount I had been hoping for,” Bruder says.
They have kept in touch with the students whose homes they visited. The donors call Bruder and report, “Hey, she got the job!” Bruder’s own student got a job, too, as a manager with a food company. Oh, and that beautiful handmade platter that the Moroccan mother gave Bruder? The one that was probably the most valuable thing in the family’s home? Bruder returned it the next day.
Bruder, who is Jewish, says he often encounters Americans who ask him why they should contribute money to the Islamic world. “Because we’re all stuck on the same planet,” Bruder tells them. And that’s about the extent of his political discussions. Bruder has no patience for talking about how and why people don’t get along. “I’m short on philosophy and long on action,” he says.
