After graduating from UWC Costa Rica, Tara moved back to Lebanon, where she worked as a volunteer in a refugee camp on a project that aims to empower Palestinian refugees between the age of 8-16 with the skills which they lacked in the classroom. Most of the students had not graduated from high school, while some had already been child soldier recruits. “My interest to work with refugees sparked while I was at UWC. UWC taught me that when you give people tools to fight ignorance and poverty, you enable them to advance. Education is not a privilege, it is the key to building bridges in divided societies like Lebanon’s. For me, this is my struggle. This work is where my passion really lies”.

Tara went on to study at the Lebanese American University in Beirut and at University College London. Today, she is the co-founder and CEO of 3QA, Third Sector Quality Assurance, a Lebanon-based social enterprise covering the Levant. It offers organisations support through a range of programmes and services that focus on holistic organisational management and excellence in governance. The goal is to introduce more effective and efficient organisational systems to third sector entities. In parallel to her career, Tara continues to invest her time in hands-on social work, as a volunteer for UWC, and several other charities.

When asked about her motivation for the work she does in support of refugees, she talks about her time at UWC, when she started to ask questions about her identity, only to find out that her grandparents sought refuge from Jerusalem to Lebanon in the '50s:  

“UWC constantly made me ask questions about my identity that I was unable to answer at first. At first, I was not really curious to actually seek the right information to answer the questions posed. Yet, after a few months, I realised that there's a lot of my identity and my family history that I don't know much about. So I began to question, skyping with my dad and family members at least once a week, asking about our family heritage and history, and then I realised that both my grandparents had been raised in Jerusalem and sought refuge in Lebanon in the 50s due to the 1948 war. They were granted citizenship, but they were amongst the fortunate ones”. Upon her return from UWC Costa Rica, she decided to get involved in projects to create more opportunities for young people from Palestine. She has undertaken varied roles in this area: including working for local NGOs empowering refugees through educational programs, think tanks carrying out policy work about to refugees in Lebanon, and international organisations like International Relief and Development as well as Oxfam. 

Tara was also one of the founding members of the UWC National Committee for Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon and has been a longstanding member of the Lebanese National Committee as well. “Giving between 2 and 5 scholarships a year to young Palestinian refugees across Lebanon has really proven to be the greatest impact I've seen to date. Each student comes from a family, a community, a society that has been oppressed and neglected for over 68 years. Giving them a scholarship revives their reason for existence and reminds them that they are not alone and that people do care for them and want to work with them to improve their conditions. Each student brings something to campus life and also brings hope that there are opportunities if one works hard and sets his/her ambitions up high”. 

Tara recalls one of the students from the Palestinian refugee camps, who was selected to study at UWC Mahindra, coming back after two years and saying: “Tara, if there's one thing that I never experienced and UWC managed to show me, it was that I was able to experience what it’s like to be treated as a normal student, a normal human being. The permanent label of a "refugee" marked on my forehead since I was born had suddenly disappeared. I felt that I finally could be treated just like everyone else. UWC taught me the essence of what humanity felt like”.  

Tara lives by the motto “Do good, and good will come to you”: “There's nothing more rewarding than the act of giving, because life really has its ways of rewarding you and making you a better person day after day”.