Field Reports
Tomorrow's Youth Organization extends its Nablus lifeline to Gaza's families
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
On a hillside in Khallet al-Amoud, above Nablus's old city, an American nonprofit has spent eighteen years proving a simple idea: that children from the camps deserve the same start as children anywhere. Tomorrow's Youth Organization — TYO to the families who climb the hill to reach it — has grown from one centre into a lifeline that now stretches to Gaza.
The organization was founded in 2007 by Hani Masri, a Nablus-born Palestinian-American businessman who built his career in Washington and never let go of the city he came from. The next year he opened the Nablus centre, which the organization describes as the first American nonprofit based in the city — not a visiting project, but a neighbour with a long-term address.
The address matters. TYO's centre serves the children and mothers of Balata, Askar and El-Ain — the refugee camps that ring Nablus and carry some of the West Bank's densest poverty — alongside the old city's poorest quarters. The families it serves have lived through two decades of raids, closures and loss.
What the centre teaches#
The programs run in four strands: early-childhood education, mental health, women's empowerment and youth livelihoods. Four-year-olds get classrooms with art, music and play — the kind of start their parents rarely had. University students train as volunteers and translators, and young graduates learn the skills that make a first job possible.
The mental-health program, sponsored by the Qatar Fund for Development, sends social workers into the centre's classrooms and into families' homes — psychosocial support delivered where children actually live, in a city where fear arrives with every incursion.
The women's empowerment strand treats mothers as the community's engine, not its afterthought: literacy, fitness, entrepreneurship and business training that has helped women from the camps open and grow enterprises of their own. Cherie Blair, Quincy Jones and Bill Clinton have all lent the organization their support over the years.
The war years#
Since October 2023, the organization has turned its neighbourhood model toward emergency relief. Its "Lifeline to Palestine" campaign delivers food security, mental-health support and home rehabilitation — and extends beyond Nablus to families in Gaza, with the organization pledging that every donated dollar goes directly to those in need.
Since last October, TYO has increased its efforts to mitigate the hardships and provide immediate relief to families in need and in critical conditions.
Tomorrow's Youth Organization, Lifeline to Palestine campaign
That expansion tells the story of the moment: an institution built patiently for one city's children, now carrying weight far beyond it. The centre on the hill still opens its doors each morning in Khallet al-Amoud — and its founder's wager, that investing in a Palestinian child's earliest years is the surest development work there is, has never looked sounder.
Masri, who grew up beside the camps his centre now serves, framed the mission from the start as generational: build the healthy society first, and tomorrow's youth will build the rest. Eighteen years on, the children of that first classroom are the university volunteers teaching the next ones.
