In 1971, more than a decade before Theo was born, Richard Nixon declared the “War on Drugs.”

If that “war,” or any of the other anti-drug platforms that the United States—and to an extent, Theo’s home country of Canada—had been even mildly successful, Theo and his friends would probably be doing something very different with their lives right now.

Actually, a lot of people—particularly those from historically marginalized groups in the U.S. and communities directly affected by the drug trade in the Americas—would probably be doing something very different with their lives right now.

Theo is a 2019 GATHER Fellow and co-founder of Catalyst, a cross-border education initiative that he said was born out of “a group of friends thinking about the drug education we had received, and how inadequate it was to help us make sense of the things we were seeing around us.”

Growing up in rural Canada, what little drug education Theo received as a child came mostly through the Drug Abuse and Resistance Education (DARE) program. In that program (which has since been declared a failure) a uniformed police officer would come into classrooms and teach 11- and 12-year-olds to “just say no” to drugs. Little, if any, attention was paid to the bigger picture, and even less space was given to kids to process what they might actually be facing in their own homes or communities.

It wasn’t until he attended college in New York City that Theo got a chance to see the rest of the picture: While volunteering at a community garden in Harlem, he began to hear first-hand accounts of the effects of the crack epidemic in the 1980s, police brutality, and young boys being sent to jail for minimal possession. His roommate at the time, Benji, a co-founder of Catalyst, also told him about the drastic spike in violence and militarization that he saw while growing up in Guatemala as a result of the drug war.

“That planted the seed of thinking that there is something here that I need to better understand,” Theo said earlier this month from Mexico City, where he now lives. After undergrad, he went on to pursue a Masters degree at Cambridge University in England, where he dedicated his thesis to the war on drugs.

“The more I started to learn about the history, the more I was really shocked and appalled that it had taken me until my Masters degree to come into contact with this body of knowledge, and I wondered why it had not been made available earlier,” Theo said.

He started thinking about his own drug education, how addiction runs in his father’s family, and, at least in the case of several of his uncles, substance abuse had always been explained to Theo as a personal moral failure of the user rather than a biological or systematic one.

“Around that time, it also came to light that one of my cousins was pretty heavily embedded in the drug trade, and I started thinking a lot about how those experiences weren’t necessarily disconnected from Benji’s experiences in Guatemala. Those drugs come from somewhere, and they follow routes that cross borders, and tie together different countries within the continent,” Theo said. “The more I thought about it, the more it seemed urgent to create a space to think through the full complexity of drugs and drug policy, specifically in the Americas.”

Along with Benji, as well as friends from Philadelphia and Mexico, Theo launched Catalyst in 2017 with the goal of creating opportunities for cross-border dialogue among youth and educators from communities directly affected by the problem. (The problem so far has been the drug war, but there are plans to add a new program around land defense in the Amazon River basin, as well.)

The program is a year-long fellowship for educators and students ages 15 to 18 from North, Central, and South America. Whereas statistics show that this age group is among those most deeply affected by the drug trade, Theo said there is often very little room for their voices in policy debates around the issues. Catalyst seeks to give them that space through their fellowship, which includes a three-week intensive incubator where participants study the problem from a transnational perspective, share personal stories of how the drug war affects them at home, and receive tools and skills to launch projects of their own back in their communities.

Not only are they able to explore the past, present, and future of drug policy debates, but they’re able to learn first hand how interconnected their lives are, despite the borders that might lie between them.

“I think that there’s a lot of power in having students live together and learn together from the different communities,” Theo said. “It is one thing to read about something in an article in the U.S., but when your friend who you have just made over the past few weeks is telling you about how these policies played out for them and their family in their village in Mexico or Colombia — it makes it personal and urgent in ways that reading something in an article or a textbook might not otherwise.”

If there are elements of the program that are starting to ring bells, it’s more than a coincidence. Theo applied for the GATHER Fellowship in part to find community support as Catalyst grows, but as he learned more about Seeds of Peace, he also began to see a kindred spirit in bringing together youth to share their experiences and empowering them to make change.

Some of the challenges Catalyst faces are also similar to those that Seeds of Peace has faced through the years, like convincing parents from places where camps aren’t common that the program was not some sort of scam; obtaining visas for the students to cross borders; raising funding; and, of course, safety for program participants once they return home.

Yet despite those challenges, like many of those with Seeds of Peace who work in areas of conflict, he feels a need to keep pushing, to keep working.

“It feels very urgent—living in Mexico and seeing the suffering that policies in other countries cause here. The levels of violence that this country is experiencing never cease to shock and terrify me,” Theo said. “And knowing that the roots of that violence extend far beyond Mexico, I can only think about this problem as everyone’s responsibility.”

This series highlights our 2019 GATHER Fellows. To learn more about the inspiring social change that Theo and our other Fellows are working towards, check out #FollowtheFellows on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Nas talks fast because his brain moves fast. He can take you deep into the trenches of a subject without you realizing you were ever standing at the edge of a new topic, and he’s constantly in motion.

This is likely one of the reasons why the New York City-based Palestinian entrepreneur has already seen more of his ideas come to fruition than most of us could dream of in a lifetime. To name a few, he’s been a part of producing an award-winning film, opening a restaurant, running a series of pop-up dinners benefiting refugees, co-founding the food experience start-up Komeeda, advising a kitchen incubator in Turkey that trains refugees to build food businesses, hosting a New York City festival of refugee food and art, and, at the time of writing this article, he was in Morocco on a gastrodiplomacy mission to introduce American halal beef and poultry to a new part of the world.

Now, as a 2019 GATHER Fellow, he’s using his experience in gastrodiplomacy and storytelling to help lift refugees out of poverty, and at the same time, coming full circle on his own story of conflict and loss of community.

For Nas, much like the refugees he works with, you have to take the time, be willing to peel back the layers, to even begin to see the whole picture.

A WINDING PATH FORWARD

Nas was just a child the first time he realized that food could be much more than fuel for the body.

“I can tell you all the cliché things, like food brings us together, the way to the heart is through the belly,” said Nas. “And they’re all true, but it’s also one of the cheapest things to weaponize.”

Growing up in a small farming village in the West Bank, Nas saw his family’s future, and past, turn into ashes, as their olive trees were burned one by one to make room for the expansion of the nearby Shilo settlement.

“Those trees had been planted by my grandmother’s grandfather,” he said. “She cried harder for those olive trees than when her husband died.”

His family did not have much money, but with a keen sense of a good opportunity when he sees one, Nas found a way to make cash fast at the age of 13: traveling to Jerusalem to buy adult videos that he would then sell at a markup in his village.

It sounds like the kind of side hustle a cheeky teenager in a movie might come up with—but it came with serious consequences. A few of his clients were caught stealing money from a charity donation box, and soon a trail was traced back to Nas for what they had used the money to buy.

As punishment, his father pulled him out of the nearby private school run by American Quakers and for a year sent him to the village school, which he said, to put it mildly, was vastly academically inferior to the Quaker school.

Seemingly overnight, he went from being one of the most popular kids in the village to becoming a social pariah. The only person who would talk to him was a boy from the poorest family in the village who was also shunned because his grandfather had been an Israeli military sympathizer.

With the sudden ostracization, Nas went into a deep depression, and was eventually diagnosed as bipolar. During that time he also developed vitiligo, a condition sometimes triggered by extreme stress in which pigment is lost from areas of the skin.

The two-tone patches on his face are a permanent reminder of the trauma he experienced in his formative years, and yet, he says it gave him an important insight that aides him today: to see how quickly others are to judge a person for their current situation in life without bothering to learn the full story.

“It allowed me to understand that you have to talk to and engage with people,” he said. “It is so important for us to look beyond what we see in front of us.”

It was a lesson that would serve him well years later, working in kitchens among other immigrants and navigating the metropolis of New York City, where he moved to in 2001.

After a few years of working sales jobs, he enrolled in Baruch College with the goal of becoming an investment banker. Unfortunately, he graduated just as the economy was beginning to bottom out, and he couldn’t find a job in finance.

Instead, he began waiting tables at a chain of barbecue restaurants in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. As he recalls, it was an extremely difficult time—he was embarrassed that he was still waiting tables while his friends were starting companies, buying apartments, and moving on with their lives.

“I felt like a failure, and I was really, really depressed. So at 30, for the first time, I went to therapy.”

It was a major turning point for Nas, one that would finally allow him to stop comparing himself to his friends and set his own future in motion.

“I decided to take ownership of waiting tables and see how that works,” he said. “Eventually, I became the best seller of wine, one of the best cooks on the line, you name it.”

In the back of those barbecue kitchens and many more after, he would hear the stories of immigrants from Mexico struggling to make a livable wage, see how a decision as small as the source of the mint garnishes for your lemonade can make all the difference to one farmer, and learn pride in serving the food of his homeland.

And it was while working at the immensely popular Lebanese restaurant ilili that Nas was eventually asked to open his own restaurant, where he began hosting special dinners to tell the stories of the Palestinian diaspora in South America. He received a call from a friend at the United Nations asking if he could help out Lutfi, a newly arrived Syrian refugee who had faced discrimination among his community for being gay.

Nas decided to adapt the dinner series to allow Lutfi to tell his own story for two evenings. Lufti had never cooked a large meal, but it didn’t matter. The dinners sold out, and soon, the Displaced Kitchens series began in collaboration with his startup, Komeeda.

They were immensely popular and went on to help many more refugees find a new way in a new land—some landed full-time jobs, others found apartments, but the point is to help others see there is more to the picture when it comes to refugees, and for the refugees to become self-sustained. Of all his projects, Nas said that these small victories are what make him most proud.

“If I can help you feed yourself and earn a living, it’s a success,” he said.

COMING FULL CIRCLE

There are many projects on Nas’s mind at any time—including making Komeeda into “the Airbnb of food experiences,” the gastrodiplomacy project for the U.S. government, a book, a television show, and setting up kitchen incubators for refugees in Sweden and Yemen.

But no matter where he is, or how much time passes, the conflicts of Nas’s youth—between Israelis and Palestinians, and the competing chemicals in his brain—seep into everything he does: his work, his motivations, his relationships, “everything.” “Every single thing, relates to the conflict,” he said.

And for Nas, that’s part of why he needed Seeds of Peace, an organization that, as a Palestinian youth growing up amid conflict, he once considered an agent of Normalization. It wasn’t so much the prestige of a fellowship, networking, or the entrepreneurial development that led him to apply to GATHER, but rather, a need to see a vision of the world in which he’d like to live, and immerse himself further in a community of changemakers working to make it a reality.

“Seeds of Peace allows me to find some healing and support for the conflict—to understand and work with what I assumed for a long time was the enemy,” he said. “I care about the actual mission of Seeds of Peace, for the future. That’s more important to me.”

He sees his purpose today to carry on the mission of humanitarian minded chefs like José Andrés and Anthony Bourdain. And though one meal is not going to solve the world’s problems, it can be a gateway to starting a conversation that might not have happened otherwise.

“I care about bringing stories to life and talking about difficult subjects through food,” he said. “How do I sit down and talk with you about solutions to the conflict in the Middle East? Let’s start through hummus and falafel.”

This series highlights our 2019 GATHER Fellows. To learn more about the inspiring social change that Nas and our other Fellows are working towards, check out #FollowtheFellows on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.