A letter from our founder

Dear friends of Amal, I am writing to you from the courtyard of our garden kitchen, where the morning smells of fresh bread and mint, and where, in a few hours, another group of women will arrive to learn a craft that can change the shape of their whole lives. After all these years, that arrival still moves me. It is the heart of everything we do.

When we opened our first doors in 2013, I could not have promised you what this year has brought. More than 400 women have now graduated from our program since 2012. Around nine in 10 of them go on to find work in the culinary sector, and in their first year, many see their income more than double. These are not just numbers to me. They are mothers who can now provide, daughters who can now dream, women who walked in unsure of their worth and walked out certain of it.

A year of growth, and a new pair of hands

This year brought a change I am especially grateful for. We welcomed Reda Boutaleb Housseini as Amal's first Executive Director. For more than a decade I have carried this mission close to my chest, and entrusting it to someone who loves it as I do is one of the proudest steps we have ever taken. Reda brings the structure, the steadiness and the fresh energy that will let Amal grow far beyond what one founder could hold alone.

It is a strange and beautiful thing to build something you hope will outlast you. With Reda alongside our team, our graduates and you, I feel, for the first time in a long time, that Amal is no longer mine to carry. It is ours.

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We are not paralyzed by the fear of imperfection. We take risks knowing they may not always turn out right, because a woman's future is worth the trying.

The road to 1,000 women by 2030

We have set ourselves a goal that frightens and thrills me in equal measure: to train 1,000 women by 2030. It is bold. It is also, I believe, exactly what this moment asks of us. In Morocco today, fewer than one in five women take part in the workforce. Behind that statistic are countless women with talent, courage and hunger to work, and too few open doors. We intend to keep opening them.

To get there, we have reshaped our training into a 10-month program that now begins with a five-week classroom foundation, before our women step into our working kitchens. Around it we wrap everything a woman needs to truly succeed: a stipend, meals, transport, health insurance, childcare support, weekly language classes and life coaching. We do not simply teach a skill and wish them well. We walk beside them, all the way into a real job.

And we are dreaming further still. Soon we will launch our Food Micro-Project Incubator and Accelerator, to help our graduates become not only employees but founders of their own small food businesses. The woman who once arrived unsure of her worth may one day sign the paychecks.

A thank you, from the bottom of my heart

None of this, not one meal, not one graduation, not one new flock of sheep delivered to a family who lost everything in the earthquake, would be possible without you. When you book a table, join a cooking class, sip a coffee at our Sign Café, cater an event with us or simply make a gift, you are pouring yourself directly into a woman's future. One hundred percent of our revenue goes straight back into this mission.

So thank you. Thank you for believing, as we do, in the quiet power of good food to change lives. Thank you for reminding every woman who walks through our doors that she deserves to be here. The years ahead will ask much of us, and I cannot wait to meet them, together, because in the end, we only have each other.