By Tom LoBianco
Hamada Zahawi MC/MPA 2017 and Emirates Leadership Initiative Fellow 2017 is the co-chair of the Center for Public Leadership’s Alumni Council. Zahawi has served on the CPL Alumni Council since 2021. In this interview with CPL, Zahawi talks about the growing community of alumni, how they can stay engaged and get involved in the mission of public service at the core of CPL.
Zahawi is a lawyer and managing partner of Veritas Global Advisers based in Santa Monica, California, with extensive experience working at the intersection of business, the public sector and more.
CPL: How did you get involved with the alumni council?
Hamada Zahawi: When I graduated from Harvard Kennedy School, my goal was to try to be as involved as possible afterwards. I'd gone to graduate schools a couple of times, and I never really felt a strong connection with the graduate program afterwards. But, at vlog I immediately started recognizing that there's a concerted effort to get folks involved.
I was very involved on campus when I was a student, and I initially joined identity groups. And then after time at vlog concluded, and since I was heavily involved at CPL as one of the fellows, I thought, well, the CPL Alumni Council would be a good natural transition for me to do something less identity-focused and more focused towards the school.
I don't think I was accepted the first time I applied, and then the second year was encouraged to apply again. And then that year I was accepted to join.
CPL: What did you work on when you were at CPL?
HZ: I was an Emirates Leadership Initiative (ELI) fellow, and a mid-career student, so I only had about a year to do my studies. I was pretty much battling FOMO [fear of missing out] the whole time, trying to do as much as I could to be involved in various areas.
When I was a student... ELI was extremely well established. We had a great person who was running it, and we had a good amount of funding, so we were really able to do a lot during that one year.
We organized a trip to San Francisco. We organized a trip to Dubai. We ended up really doing a lot for the fellows. We got some professors…to provide us with their time to come, specifically for our group to really train us up on public speaking and public narrative. We had a variety of different things that were really unique to us that we were able to pull off.
There was one other thing that we got really involved in, because ELI is a Middle Eastern organization and this was during the first Trump administration’s travel ban. Since there were a lot of people that were in our program affected by that, we also got very involved in the Harvard Arab Student Association. We were able to sponsor certain events for other Arabs at Harvard.
Another instance that I thought was really fantastic was that CPL was very encouraging of people doing community service. They challenged us to come up with a community service project for each fellowship. So we did that for Syrian refugees, which we also were able to get some funding for during the course of the year.
CPL: What are some things CPL Alumni can do to give back?
HZ: When I joined, we were smack in the middle of COVID. We weren't able to do too much. And then I think our big play was that we got involved in CPL’s 25th reunion. It was a fairly big event and also coincided with the retirement of David Gergen.
Alumni can get more involved by attending those reunions, attending regional events, being ready to jump on board when asked to be mentors, or by allowing themselves to be mentees to other alumni mentors that need support.
A good way to think about CPL Alumni Council is that there's three buckets. The first would be to help connect. You're connecting folks. You're playing that role where you're trying to bring regional events together so that folks can come together. You’re pushing out news, pushing action items, doing things that really keep everyone feeling involved.
I think it's been 20 years since CPL started, and I think we're at maybe 1,200 alumni. They're scattered predominantly in the US, but also internationally. There's obviously a contingency in the Middle East with the ELI Fellowship, and a contingency in Israel, and then a contingency of folks that are internationals who received scholarships and fellowships and went back to their respective countries. So, from that perspective, I think keeping everybody close knit together is playing a proactive role. There's an onus put on you as a CPL alum, if you receive the funding as a fellow, that you really should not just take that money and disappear, but that you should continue serving and paying it forward for other folks.
The second bucket is to help prepare. You’re helping alumni get on the right path in terms of their careers. So, putting on workshops for folks and playing the role of mentor to get them to be where they need to be. Even working with current fellows to also prepare them on the career path, given the caliber of the CPL fellows that are already in the program.
The final, third bucket is to help inspire. It's a very interesting yet very important bucket, because what it's trying to do is to say, ‘Listen, we all went to CPL. Public Leadership is something to do with public service, community, right? It's not private leadership. It's called public leadership.’” It's about giving back to the greater society. The goal here is to try to get people to continue to give back.
There's going to be folks who want to go from the private sector back to the public sector. Folks who are in the private sector who want to at least donate some of their time to the public to the public sector. Our goal on the Alumni Council is to really focus and drill down on how we can help any of these people really live up to that onus [for public leadership] that we are all mandated to carry out.
CPL: What are some good ways to give back to the public sector?
HZ: That's a huge question, what can you do to get more involved? When we looked at this, we need to realize not everyone is going to want to run for congress or become a senator, or run for president.
I think the idea is that there's going to be people giving back in different gradations, as long as they're involved in some public sector work, or public service in the form of volunteering, mentoring, or donating. This could also be from being part of the Alumni Council, playing an active role as an alum, or going all the way through to running the CSR (corporate social responsibility) of your company.
What you want to ask yourself is ‘In my life, in a given year, what have I done to give back?’
Taking me for example, I'm a lawyer. I don't necessarily work in the public sector, even though I feel like some of the work that I do has a lot of advocacy for society. It’s for profit. But in some aspects, I still try to do certain things that are for the public sector. It may not necessarily be leadership, per se, but if leadership is acting in a certain way to help society and other people…you know, on a very low level, that could also be quite inspiring for people as well.
If somebody comes to us and says, “Look, you know, I've been working at this tech company for the last 30 years, and I really want to do more public service. What are some ideas?”
You can crowdsource those ideas. People start throwing things around like, “oh, you should be involved in this board, or try to do this, or help raise money for this school” and whatever part of the world that is in dire straits, or taking a proactive effort.
And I think that is why there is a CPL alumni community. So that we could crowdsource ideas together to help people really achieve the highest level of public service that they possibly could in their vision.