From Imagination to Infrastructure: One Year Building Women Champions for Change

“Come with me, and you'll be

In a world of pure imagination

Reach out, touch what was once

Just in your imagination”

I love chocolate. But the world I imagine has less to do with candy and more with women working together toward a more peaceful, secure, and prosperous future — for all.

Over the past year, together with an extraordinary team, we tried to turn a small part of that imagination into something real.

We built a network of more than 100 women social change leaders — NGO leaders, diplomats, academics, social entrepreneurs, activists — from Morocco to the UAE to Israel and beyond, spanning different faiths, communities, and political worldviews. They are united not by identical views, but by something both simpler and harder: a desire to change the reality of our region for the better, and a willingness to collaborate across divides to do so.

During our first year, we met as a network eight times, convened women physically in Israel and Abu Dhabi, and hosted public regional conversations on some of the most difficult issues affecting our region. More than 1,000 people participated in WCC programmes and public events. We mapped more than 130 organizations working at the intersection of women's leadership and regional change, and supported women in developing ideas for cross-border initiatives — from joint research to regional collaborations and new platforms for women's leadership.

For me, this is what makes social innovation so exciting: it gives people a way to take something they deeply imagine should exist in the world — and begin building it.

Becoming a woman of the Middle East

But this particular journey changed more than the external world around me. It changed me. As I said on stage in September, at the event we hosted with the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation, WCC added an important layer to my identity: Woman of the Middle East.

Israel is my country (for good and bad) and the Middle East is my region (for good and bad). I am part of its history, geography, unbearable heat, food, contradictions, and culture.

I know the fear of watching people in northern Israel leave their homes yet again because missiles are falling. I still shed tears hearing stories of October 7th. And I also feel responsibility and pain when confronted with the suffering in Gaza and the realities Palestinians experience in the West Bank.

But WCC opened emotional and physical corridors into realities that had previously felt further away.

Through the personal stories of Iranian members of our network, the videos of the Iranian regime killing its own people became more personal. When conflict intensified between Israel and Lebanon, I found myself asking about the families and friends of colleagues there. When missiles flew over the UAE, I was checking in with people I now knew and cared about.

That said, being a woman of the Middle East is not only about sharing pain. It is about sharing responsibility for what comes next.

The women in our network have been leading social change, in some cases for decades: advancing freedom of religion in Egypt, protecting children's lives in Iran, building economic opportunities in Morocco, responding to urgent needs in Gaza, strengthening communities, and challenging injustice in many different forms across many different countries.

Working alongside them has made one conviction stronger for me: the reality of division, conflict, and war in our region is not inevitable. It is created by people, institutions, choices, and systems — and it can be created differently.

Maybe it's a cliché to say it, but almost nobody has actually tried the simplest thing: put women in charge. Or even more simply, put women at the table where the decisions get made.

Look at the photo from Sharm el-Sheikh in October 2025, when the world's leaders gathered to sign the Gaza ceasefire. Dozens of men, and barely a woman in the frame. That image is not an accident. It is the system.

Collaboration without political sameness

One of the most important things WCC changed for me was my understanding of what it means to collaborate across divides. Throughout my career, I have worked across boundaries: countries, cultures, religions, and sectors. I thought of myself as someone comfortable with difference.

But, if I'm truthful, there was often an invisible condition: the people I worked closely with generally shared my broad political worldview. Difference of identity felt manageable. Difference of politics was harder. WCC challenged that.

Many times I worked closely with women whose political positions I did not fully know, and sometimes could reasonably assume were different from mine. Yet we could still recognize a shared value and decide to act around it.

Freedom of religion, for example, can matter deeply to me as a secular liberal woman and to a religious conservative colleague for very different reasons.

We do not have to agree about everything in order to recognize that value in one another and work to protect it. I did not change my political beliefs over the past year. What changed was my understanding of what political disagreement has to mean.

We live in a time of chronic fragmentation. The discourse of left and right, conservative and liberal, Israeli and Palestinian, religious and secular increasingly encourages us to believe that disagreement on one issue makes collaboration on everything else impossible.

I no longer believe we can afford that.

Just as I do not lose my Israeli or Jewish identity by working closely with Palestinian colleagues, I do not lose my liberal identity by collaborating with conservative colleagues. Collaboration across divides is not the absence of conviction. It is a strategy for creating change in a fragmented world.

First people. Then impact.

WCC also strengthened another belief I have carried through much of my career: people create impact. A recurring question in building WCC was where to put our limited resources.

Should we invest primarily in tangible projects, outputs, and initiatives, the things that are easiest to explain to funders and measure on a spreadsheet? Or should we invest first in the women themselves, and in the relationships and trust between them?

Of course, ultimately we need both. But when resources are limited, sequencing matters. For me, relationships are not the soft part that happens around the "real" work.

They are infrastructure.

I saw that particularly clearly when, shortly after another escalation between Israel and Iran, I moderated a public conversation with three Iranian women from our network.

The objective was not simply to organize another webinar. We wanted to demonstrate that another form of relationship in this region was possible: Israeli and Iranian women appearing publicly together, speaking in their own voices at a moment when almost every public image of the relationship between our countries was one of hostility, military power, and men.

That conversation could not have been organized from scratch that week. It became possible because of the months before it: calls, discussion, small conversations, face-to-face meetings, checking in on one another, listening, and slowly building enough trust to enter a difficult public space together.

Trust was not an outcome sitting beside the project. Trust was what made the project possible. If the impact we seek is more collaboration across the Middle East, we cannot jump directly to collaboration. We have to build the human infrastructure that makes it possible.

And why women?

Throughout the year, this question kept coming up: Why women? Why create a space centres specifically on women leaders? What was happening in our gatherings that made the rooms feel so different?

I don't think the answer is that women are inherently more peaceful, collaborative, or empathetic. Women are as diverse politically and personally as men.

But context matters.

Across our region, many of the formal spaces where security, diplomacy, and political futures are discussed remain overwhelmingly male. At the same time, women are already leading extraordinary social, economic, and community change, often from spaces that receive much less visibility and power.

Bringing those women together changes who is recognized as a regional actor. That is the core of the WCC strategy.

It brings into the room leaders rooted not only in institutions, but also in communities. It creates space for experiences and forms of leadership that are often absent from traditional regional conversations. And, perhaps most importantly, it allows relationships to form between women who might otherwise never see one another as partners.

The question for me now is therefore less "What makes women uniquely capable of leading change?" It is: what becomes possible when women who are already leading change locally are connected, trusted, and enabled to act regionally?

How we actually build things

WCC also showed me something essential about our own work at Co-Catalyst.

Co-Catalyst brings people together across boundaries to think, collaborate, and act on complex social challenges. When no single actor holds the answer, we try to build the collective capacity to act. WCC became one of the clearest examples of what that looks like in practice.

First it is about understanding the system. We spoke with women across the region. We listened to potential partners, experts, and funders. We tried to understand where initiatives already existed, where relationships were missing, and where WCC could genuinely add value rather than duplicate what others were already doing.

Then we connected people — speaking first individually with women across the network, taking the time to learn about their work, their motivations, and their skills, and in doing so, already laying the foundation of trust and exchange that everything else would depend on.

We tested programmes and formats. We curated a series of four webinars last summer, then brought women together for a hybrid and, later, a face-to-face event. Every one of these was shaped by the experience, knowledge, and interests of the women themselves — not designed for them in advance. And we adapted constantly, as the political reality around us shifted, often week to week.

Underneath all of it was our institutional mindset — thinking about leadership, governance, and long-term sustainability from the very first conversation, long before there was anything resembling an organization. That mindset, present from day one and never an afterthought, is what let WCC grow from a series of relationships and events into a standing initiative.

In Co-Catalyst language, we call this process of working across boundaries:

The work happens before the room, inside the room, and after people leave it. And none of it happens alone.

Over the past year, we drew repeatedly on a network of advisors and collaborators with expertise in women's leadership, regional affairs, network-building, social innovation, and impact.

Sometimes the most valuable contribution was knowledge. Sometimes it was challenging our assumptions. Sometimes it was simply knowing the right person to call or the right door to open. I want to thank all of WCC's advisors for their invaluable insight and time.

WCC reinforced something I increasingly believe about our work at Co-Catalyst: our role is not necessarily to have the answer. It is to help create the conditions in which the right people can find better answers together — and then build something from them.

The journey continues

Social change is always collective.

I had the enormous privilege of building WCC alongside Danny Hakim, its founder, and Ayelet Mavor, my co-creator, together with a wonderful team, advisors, partners, and supporters who believed in the possibility of this initiative before there was much evidence that it could work.

Most of all, I am grateful to every woman in the network who chose — particularly during one of the most difficult periods our region has experienced — to remain in conversation with people across borders and divides. My own role in WCC is now evolving, but my commitment to this work is not.

If you want to view paradise

Simply look around and view it

Anything you want to, do it

Wanna change the world?

There's nothing to it

A year ago, WCC lived only in our imagination. Today, more than a hundred women are helping turn that imagination into reality. But the work is only beginning.

The challenge now is to ensure that these women — already leading change in their communities and countries — have the sustained support, resources, tools, and opportunities to expand their impact beyond borders. To strengthen the relationships and trust that make collaboration across divides possible. And to ensure that their knowledge, experience, and leadership are not only recognised, but meaningfully represented in shaping the future of our region.

Because bringing women together is an important first step. Enabling them to shape what comes next is where the real transformation begins.