Serene Dardari

Serene Dardari is a Syrian social change maker and a civil society communication advisor. Serene received esteemed award of “Young Innovators Creating A Better World For All” at the Women Economic Forum 2018. She is the chairperson of the Lebanon Youth Inter-regional Charter for the All ladies League.

She did her first internship with the UN World Food Program in Damascus when she was only fifteen years old; during which she worked with Palestinian and Iraqi refugees in Syria, little did she know that this was the beginning of a long, life-changing mission: the fight for human dignity and security. Serene holds a B.A. in Communication Arts from the Lebanese American University, a diploma in Care Economy from the U.N. Women Training Centre, and is completing her applied Masters in Conflictology with the University of Catalonia and the United Nations Institute For Training and Research. Serene is a Tedx Speaker, a certified grant writer and a project design trainer.

In 2014, she founded her social enterprise called “Shams Network”; (The Sun, in Arabic) which designs and implements initiatives, social projects and safe spaces to promote sustainable livelihoods for those in need, through quality products & services that engage customers in social responsibility. Shams operates on two distinct pillars: the first being the social business, through which it supports humanitarian non-profits and social initiatives, by providing them with communication services, helping them acquire funds and receive exposure and support from local and international communities, and through the second pillar, she mobilizes her team, her friends, relatives and networks to assist in the provision of monetary and in-kind donations; linking well-off people to refugee families for sponsorships and creates medium-scale relief campaigns such as winter-drives and soup kitchens. “When she help their Syrian brothers and sisters in Lebanon, She also helping Lebanon as a whole, in fact, She helping humanity as a whole. Why? Because She truly believe that we are not well unless we are all well”.