Essraa Nawar

Essraa Nawar Essraa Nawar received her Bachelor’s degree in commerce with an emphasis in accounting from Alexandria University, Egypt (2002). She also holds an MBA from the American Management & Business Administration Institute, Cambridge, MA (2005), a Master of Arts in Organizational Leadership (MAOL) from Brandman University (2015), California AND a Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) at San Jose State University, California (2017). She is currently applying to pursue her PDH in educational leadership. Essraa Nawar has been the Head of Library Development and Marketing and the Chair of the Arts, Exhibits and Events Committee at the Leathery Libraries at Chapman University, California, since 2009 where she helped raise over 1.5 million dollars in support of the Libraries at Chapman University. She co-curated the exhibits “Empowering Muslim Women”, “Egypt the Revolution Continues” and a “ A Country called Syria”. Over the years Essraa has studied, lived and worked in many places, including the Gulf area (Qatar), Washington D.C., where she worked for The Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia, and Alexandria, Egypt where she worked for Bibliotheca Alexandrina. In 2009, she moved with her husband and family to Orange County, California in 2009. Essraa is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post, the Orange County Register and several other magazines and blogs where she shares her story as a Muslim Women living in American and is also trying to bridge cultural misunderstandings between Arabs, Muslims and Americans through her artwork. Essraa was also recently appointed to join as a Women Leader in the Internet Marketing Association. She is very passionate about and active in the topics of diversity, cultural and religious intelligence, interfaith dialogue and empowering Muslim Women. She thrives best in diverse environments and believes in the power of humanity. She thinks that we all have the power to change the world one person at a time. in addition to her agile and full regional speaking engagements, she recently took her diversity message to the international stage where she spoke at a TED conference at the Technical University of Munich on how to feel welcomed and empowered in a diverse world. Her talk (only live for a few months) has been viewed and shared more than 6000 times and have since been sharing her message through public speaking, radio interviews and podcasts in numerous venues. Nawar has been the recipient of several awards and grants from the American Library Association, the International Federation of libraries, Chapman University and San Jose State University over the last few years. She was recently appointed as an IFLA (International Federation of library associations) fellow and she also represented the American Library Association in Sharjah in November 2016. In May 2017, the College of Applied Sciences and Arts at San Jose State University named her the recipient of the Ken Haycock Award for Exceptional Professional Promise where she will be honored by being the Outstanding Student speaker at convocation. In July 2017, Essraa has received an invitation from the Egyptian Government to participate in this conference that took in Cairo from the 2nd to the 3rd of July 2017. This conference came under the sponsorship of the Egyptian President H.E. Abdelfattah El-Sisi. The Ministry of State for Emigration & Egyptian Expatriates’ Affairs and the National Council for Women have included Essraa due to her strong academic and professional achievements. She was able to showcase the strength, power, and resilience of female Egyptian expatriates. In addition, she was honored as one of the top 30 Egyptian women abroad. Her professional interests include developing and implementing marketing, branding, and communications and fundraising practices to support academic Libraries as well as maintaining an integrated external relations model targeting prospective donors, current donors, board members and external partners. In her free time, Essraa enjoys reading, listening to music, traveling spending time with her husband who she calls her best friend and soul mate, watching her boys as they perform gymnastics and diving, in which they excel and are both part of the USA National team as well as spending time with her 7 years old girl who is a gymnast and a ballerina. Website: http://essraanawar.com/ Twitter/Instagram Handle: @essraanawar