Planting the “Seeds of Life” in Morocco

Written by Office of Alumni Affairs Intern Mohammad Samhouri

Errachid Montassir grew up on a Moroccan farm, never forgetting his roots as he developed a passion for community development..

Errachid who is an ExchangeAlumni of the Community Engagement Exchange (CEE) Program, together with Alena Klimas, a Peace Corps ExchangeAlumni, channeled this passion in their 2023 Citizen Diplomacy Action Fund (CDAF)  grant application, ultimately winning a grant for their project, Seeds of Life.

Initially pitched as an environmental project to promote arboriculture and empower youth in Errachid’s home village in Morocco’s Rhamna province, Seeds of Life is much more than it seems from the outside. Alena and Errachid came to realize that the project actually went much further.

“I realized it touches on many priorities of the community: economic growth, environment and climate, and agriculture,” Errachid, said. “Seeds of Life really touches on all these pillars of the community.”

The grant was used to build a greenhouse at the school Errachid attended as a child, promoting the benefits of arboriculture by planting organic fruit trees. The project not only promoted the types of acts that will help curb climate change and desertification in the region but also economic development through an income for local farmers, as well as empowered women in the community by giving them the opportunity to design and manage the project.

Alena and Errachid say the project is not so much theirs but the community’s; since Seeds of Life’s inception, they have actively worked to ensure its success and preservation, though Alena and Errachid have leaned into overcoming barriers to get the project off the ground, and have sought out other opportunities to expand it, seeing it as a model for development that can benefit all of Morocco, not just the Rhamna province.

Growing Partnerships

Alena met Errachid during her time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco, working with him in his capacity at the High Atlas Foundation, a Moroccan non-profit centered on community development. They would continue to work together in Morocco through USAID’s Farmer-to-Farmer (F2F) program, which Errachid was managing at the time.

“Errachid was the point person for many American volunteers and farming experts in Morocco that went there to work with cooperatives,” Alena said. “That’s really what brought us together in a deeper way, even after I finished my Peace Corps.”

It was this experience in the F2F program that would lead to their partnership, with Errachid eventually sharing his idea for Seeds of Life with Alena. While the initial concept was much larger, Alena and Errachid settled on a small pilot project in Errachid’s home village in Morocco’s Rhamna province — and identified CDAF as a funding source.

“I kept feeling like this was a project that would be perfect for CDAF,” Alena said. “Errachid and I had both done [multiple] exchanges, and I think both of us really represent citizen diplomacy, action, and community development.” Alena began studying Arabic in Jordan after receiving a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship in 2015, eventually studying in Morocco through the Critical Language Scholarship before she volunteered with the Peace Corps. Errachid was part of the first iteration of the Community Engagement Exchange (CEE), where worked on community development initiatives and urban agriculture in Chicago.

Overcoming Challenges

Implementing the project in the village didn’t come without challenges. A main barrier was access to the community, as trust was essential to starting the project.

“You have to rebuild trust and everything, people will think you’re from the government, people will think it’s an election thing,” Errachid said. “All these barriers, of course, are fine, but having a project in a school in Morocco, that’s a double barrier.”

Getting permission to have their project on the school grounds took almost a month, according to Alena. Morocco is very serious about its education, with strict scrutiny surrounding outside projects and funding. Alena had faced something similar during her time in the Peace Corps as well. But utilizing the network they had built, they were able to bring numerous parties, including the Ministry of Education and other elected officials, together and get the project approved and off the ground.

Most importantly, they were able to rally the community behind Seeds of Life, helping many in the community and the larger Rhamna Province realize that they all shared the same goals.

“We brought them together to really express what they need and the priorities of this area,” Errachid said. “It turns out the priorities were shared, it was a common goal that they never expressed to each other. That’s been a very successful story in itself.”

Seeds of Life’s Evolution

When a devastating earthquake struck Morocco in September 2023, the project had to shift. Many of those working on the project were impacted by the earthquake, even though the project itself was unharmed. Errachid himself was a first responder. So with many villages having collapsed, the project team decided that some of the trees from their project would go to heavily impacted communities first, securing a source of income for those villages and serving as a symbol of the rebuilding effort.

Since then, the project has expanded. Errachid was invited to pitch Seeds of Life to the United Nations in Italy, and he successfully secured a second year of funding. This effort also paved an opportunity for it to spread even further as Errachid founded Eco-Linko, an eco-tourism company with a tree-planting initiative similar to Seeds of Life.

"Seeds of Life is continuing to grow in ways that we didn’t even know were possible,” Alena said. “The small pilot was a success with the school, we’re going to see more and more trees being given out to individual families and other schools.”

While they wait on partnership news, Alena and Errachid gave some words of advice for ExchangeAlumni considering applying for a CDAF grant.

“If you’re an alumni considering a proposal, I would lean into someone who has expertise in that community, who really can identify gaps to come up with a project that’s innovative and really suits the community,” Alena said.

Errachid agreed on the community focus, and added that sometimes getting a project off the ground is about “making noise.”

“Sometimes I feel like making noise in a good way really does help,” he said.

Those interested in the progress of Seeds of Life and more on the story can read Alena’s blogs about the projects on Medium.