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Musap (Moose) Abdelhag is a tech entrepreneur, Founder and CEO of QA Enterprises, and AI strategist with over fifteen years of experience building enterprise systems and leading cross-functional teams. He is Harvard Business School Online certified in Disruptive Strategy and recognized as an award-winning technologist and community changemaker.

Moose's work spans AI-driven consulting, education technology (Mini Techies), and youth entrepreneurship (Struggle Is Your Success nonprofit).

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Chapters

0:00:00 "I lived the life of trauma."
0:00:35 Intro
0:01:52 On double immigration again
0:04:34 Growing up as an immigrant kid in Calgary
0:09:10 Falling into the cracks
0:19:29 Moving back to Sudan
0:25:16 Moving his whole family to Canada
0:31:41 What the settlement sector is missing on youth
0:44:17 What youth programming means
0:50:51 What immigrant parents need to understand
0:53:25 Would you want to be famous
0:57:15 Outro

Takeaways

  • The immigrant sector keeps measuring the adults. However, the kids don't show up in any of the numbers (employment rates, housing placements, language scores) until they show up in the justice system. By then, the damage is already a few years old. We need to do better.

  • We have somehow build a world where an algorithm with no investment in a child's wellbeing offers them more of what they need than their parents or organizations that exist to serve them. And then we rail at the social media companies when we should also be asking what we've taken away from the lives of kids that ended up making social media so appealing in the first place.

  • Moose believes the settlement sector is missing a lot of resources around immigrant youth. I think what's he's pointing at is harder to fix than a budget line. For example, the benefits of investing in spaces where youth and kids can exist without being profiled or judged can be hard to show in a funders dashboard. Moose believes this sort of relational and preventative work, the kind that builds trust and belonging over time, has to come first before the career guidance, or any of the other preferred youth programming. I don't know how the sector fixes that without changing what it measures.

Where to find Moose:

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