Interview with Prince Feisal Al Hussein, JOC President

Prince Feisal has been President of the Jordan Olympic Committee (JOC) since 2003 and is also the Chairman and founder of Generations For Peace, ambulance a charitable peace building organisation. He has been Chairman of the organisation since 2007.

In terms of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Prince Feisal has been a member of the Women and Sport commission since 2006 and Entourage since 2010. 

He is the son of King Hussein of Jordan and Princess Muna Al Hussein.

By Daniel Anwar

Congratulations on being re-elected for a third term as JOC President, what are your plans for the coming term?

The elections happened a couple of weeks ago, we’ve got a number of new board members, so our media plan is to get them up to speed – to understand how they work and how the Olympic Committee works.

The hard work then starts, when you’ve actually got to look at reviewing the strategy we had and then deciding on any modifications that we feel are necessary to really implement the strategy and prepare for Rio in 2016, so we’ve got quite a bit of work ahead of us, but I hope that by reviewing it and adjusting it accordingly, we will maximise our chances of having athletes ready to compete in 2016.

One of your initiatives is Generations for Peace. What were your personal motivations for establishing that?

When we looked at Generations for Peace, the inspiration was looking at the issues of peace and peace-building, and looking at my father’s legacy, and the challenge is how do you make peace plans at the grass-roots, at the street level? So in working and looking at that, with a lot of research and preparation with my co-founder, we came out with the plan as a way of initially looking at sports as being a tool for peace-building, but we’ve since expanded that to include art, music and advocacy as a way to bring young people together in an activity that they enjoy and letting them interact, building respect and acts of tolerance.

We came out with this formula that seems to be working very, very well and we’ve had great achievements in the six years since we started.

What is it about sport in particular that has the power to bring people together and change lives?

I think sport is a great mechanism to teach a lot of very valuable life lessons including respect for rules, teamwork, being able to work together, building respect. There’s so much that you can learn in sports that can be applied in life.

Sports are great, particularly when you’re focusing on children, because they love to play. It’s natural for children to play, they enjoy all types of sports and a competitive environment and it’s what they can learn together, how to work together, from different parts of communities and to respect each other for it, is so great.

If you put a ball in front of any child, even a one or two-year-old, they’re going to try and kick it. It’s almost built into our DNA, a love for sport. It’s universal and it’s something kids really enjoy to do. It’s a way to have a captive audience and teach them good life skills and also teach them respect for each other and to work together – that’s the power sports have and the Olympics is a great example of just that thing.

Are there examples in particular of how Generations for Peace has had that impact on children and young people?

We have programmes running in 46 countries. In Asia, Africa and Europe and there have been a lot of examples of great success stories that have happened. You need to start, you need to adapt to the local environment. One programme  for instance   is working displaced people in refugee camps in Pakistan and has been extremely successful, they have got a  lot of people participating, started off very small but as people see the fruits and the results of these programmes more and more people have been asking ‘we want to have these types of programmes in our community and so it has grown and we have had over 210,000 children involved and our delegates have gone on to train over 8,000 like-minded youth leaders in their communities to be able to run these programmes. So I think in a very short period of time we have had some great success stories and really, it’s difficult to explain it. But you really need to speak to the people who are actually doing the programmes on the ground and listen to their stories and how they have been able to transform their own communities.

As well as being a big success it must be a difficult logistics task. So how do you manage working around the world like you do?

The programmes that we have, the basic camps where we bring in people from the conflicting communities and we teach them all the processes of how to use Generations For Peace. And it doesn’t stop there, when they go back to their communities and become delegates once completed the camp we continue to mentor them, we work with them, we try help them and in some cases partner them up with other  organisations within their communities to try and help them succeed.

We have done a lot of good work, in this last year or so we have been focussed on doing advanced courses, where we bring in on average 30 of our peace pioneers who have demonstrated successfully run programmes and giving them another 5 day training programme to take them up to the next level so they can be more effective and more productive.

Right now we have one of our basic camps which now include 4 new countries: Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya all participating, and that’s the first time for us to move into North Africa and this camp was supported by the Norwegian government. And so we are continuing to expand the envelop and it doesn’t stop at the end of the camp, it’s the start of that relationship. We continue to help, mentor and support them so they can run successful programmes in their community.

Generations For Peace was established six years ago, what do you hope to have achieved six years from now?

We were very lucky this year. We were recognised as one of the top 100 NGO’s in the world by a global magazine which in 6 years is very impressive. We will hope to continue to expand that work, reach more countries, and have more programmes. We are trying to balance between running programmes and supporting them.

We also started the Generations For Peace Institute a couple of years ago which looks at bringing in the academic community to look and evaluate sports for peace and development. We are making the information accessible, we’ve got scholarships for people to study in that field and to do field research to demonstrate the impact sports for peace and development can have as well as being able to help us monitor and evaluate what we are capable of doing, and to make sure that what we’re teaching has the greatest impact and is the most innovative and that it is sustainable.

We’ve tried to close the loop at both training, support in the field as well as getting feedback and doing an academic evaluation of what we are doing so that we can get the lessons learnt and help the sports for peace and development community understand the impact it has, and what works and what doesn’t work in that field.

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