Salam Kedan is the Founder of Salam Centre for Peace. Salam is an international thought leader in the MUN Impact community, and fierce advocate for the use of Model United Nations to break down barriers and to promote intercultural dialogue, one delegate at a time.
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My name is Salam Kedan. I am 22 years old and I found my voice through MUN. My first experience joining an international conference was through an online organization called Online Model United Nations. Through this experience I’ve met, for the first time in my life, students from all around the world that led me to eventually discover my identity because of my interactions with them, and the questions that I got that otherwise, I would not think of if I didn’t travel outside my city.
This discovery made me feel ashamed of myself; I was living in ignorance which is very dangerous. I am a Palestinian born with Israeli citizenship, and was raised to believe that I was Israeli. I was left completely blind to my history and true identity. I thought that my situation was normal, that it’s ok to not be treated equally because I am not good enough, that there are different classes and my class is not respected. After joining international MUN conferences, meeting many students from all around the world, and saw how their lives were, I realised that my situation was not right. It was not ok for me to be treated this way. It was not ok for my community to forget their history and have their identity erased.
Often when I meet someone for the first time, they have no idea about my situation. We don’t have a voice, which is something I deeply believed needed to be changed. I started working with Online MUN as the Middle East and Africa Assistant Director. I then began to organize my own MUN travel teams, so that other students could have some of the same experiences I was having. I reached out to students from my community to travel and join international conferences-to have a stronger voice together. The first delegation I arranged with Online MUN was to THIMUN Qatar in 2014. I had two students from my community on the online team. Meeting and interacting with Arab and Muslim students was very interesting; both sides became more enlightened and knowledgeable about each other. My voice became more confident and story grew bigger in my community, and more students wanted to join. I’ve travelled with more than 20 students from my community to international MU N conferences. But I finally decided in 2016, along with the students that I had travelled with, to open our own organisation that would be aimed to raise awareness and connect students from all around the world. This was when we started Salam Centre for Peace, a non-profit organization based in my hometown of Baqa al Gharbiyye. We opened our Centre in September 2016.
Ever since we established the organization, we have been able to send more than 80 students to international conferences under the name of the Salam Centre. It’s been a great success, and we are still trying to do more, to raise awareness about the SDGs in our community, to be active members of society, to empower the youth and encourage them to make a difference and to improve our living standards. We found that MUN conferences create some of the best environments for students to connect regardless of who they are. We are planning to host our own conferences soon, to welcome students from all around the world to come and meet us and see how life is for young people in our community, but how beautiful (and changeling) it can sometimes be.
Joining MUN gave me a bigger purpose in my life and opened up many opportunities for me. Up until now I have joined more than 30 conferences. I have been invited to speak at seven international conferences as well as invited to join a meeting at the UN and represent my organization because of my experience with MUN. So all I can say now is that I am very grateful for all these opportunities that are now contributing to a much bigger difference. Grateful for meeting many inspirational people that inspired me to do more. To Ms Lisa Martin who always pushed me to do more from day one, who encouraged me to give my first speech at the Hague when I was shaking while delivering it. When I was extremely shy to even introduce myself to new people. So thank you very much! You made MUN impact me and my life the way it did. To Ryan Villanueva for the great summer course that taught me a lot about MUN, made me more confident, and for the inspiring conversations about MUN and its power. To Nabila Elassar for always being there and believing in me. To 
Ibrahim ElKazaz, for learning about my existence from my first presentation at QLC, then challenging the norms and volunteering to visit and teach MUN to students in our community. To Maryam and Alya for starting their own charity at such a young age for refugee women who were some of my biggest inspirations. To Rahmat, Suliman, Mursal… The list could go on and on to the many many more inspiring people that I met through MUN. All these interactions got me to where I am today, doing the work that I am doing