The High Atlas Foundation´s (HAF) partnership with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and Mohammed Premier University, Oujda (UMP) through their project, Promoting Civil Society-University Engagement-Oriental, is building a bridge between civil society organizations (CSOs) and university students.

In May, 2025, training sessions provided by the Oujda Legal Aid Clinic brought together graduate and undergraduate students, as well as 20 CSO members. Students and CSOs had the opportunity to collaborate and enhance their competency in community engagement and administrative project leadership. Just as impactfully, joint university and CSO training sessions fostered vital networking and dynamic learning opportunities for students as they interacted with field professionals from larger organizations.

For example, training sessions, facilitated by Mrs. Kenza Sammoud, on fundraising and grant writing methods, equipped participants with a comprehensive knowledge of project management including: identifying, targeting, and building relations with donors and public and private institutions; strategic fundraising techniques and approaches; how to structure and organize budgets, grants, and financial data; how to develop project proposals that adequately factor in, monitor, and evaluate community needs and impacts.

In addition to this, Training of Trainers (ToT) sessions aimed to equip CSO members and students with the necessary skills and methodological tools to facilitate their own interactive, participatory workshops. Participants were trained in phases: the first phase was theoretical and introduced how to correctly engage with a workshop’s target audience, specifically how to identify relevant topics and a community’s goals, as well as how to effectively communicate.

The second phase was practical, and had participants implement what they had learned in a hands-on way. Participants were “divided into small groups and tasked with designing simulated workshops based on real-life scenarios.”

Both universities and CSOs are instrumental in implementing sustainable development initiatives, and the training these groups received from this project is supporting them to come together to address the needs of their local communities. By bringing together organizational officials and students in this way, student volunteers at the Legal Clinic were able to implement knowledge on how to engage their clients and the community they serve, as well as professional practices used by representatives from the participating CSOs.

This training not only expanded students’ ability to provide high quality legal services to the community, but also built a foundation of confidence to orchestrate their own future workshops, especially ones that focus on expanding legal education locally. Further, this project highlights that the combination of academic and theoretical knowledge with tangible field work is not only possible but also needed if universities and CSOs are to continue to mobilize in service of participatory development initiatives.