A second response 

On the morning of March 2, Joe Chalfoun woke up to a reality he had lived before. As President of the AUB UNICEF Club of the Academic Year 2025-2026, the largest club on campus with over 500 members, he had spent the previous war coordinating volunteers and keeping people moving. He knew what this meant. They spent the first week watching and assessing, then made the call: this was not going to be short. They cancelled everything on the calendar and shifted entirely to humanitarian response. 

Dana Al Hachem, Vice President of both the AUB UNICEF Club and the Political Science and Public Administration Student Society of the Academic Year 2025-2026, had her own experience to draw from. She had launched an initiative for migrant workers during the previous war and came into this one with a clearer sense of how to navigate the landscape. One of her first moves was to establish contact with grassroots initiatives already on the ground: Nation Station, Pillows of Hope, and others, and make sure the club knew where it could plug in.

From the start, both understood that their role was less about being present in shelters and more about making sure others could somehow contribute to the relief efforts. 

Adapting to a different kind of crisis 

The club’s response this time was built on structure. Working through the Office of Student Affairs, they compiled a shared Excel sheet listing NGOs by name, location, contact information, and scope of work. It was distributed to club and society presidents across campus, giving student leaders a practical map of where help was needed and who was already working there. Clubs could add their names to initiatives they wanted to join, and the list was updated regularly as new organizations were added.  

On social media, Dana focused on advocacy alongside logistics, documenting the stories of youth and children affected by the war, calling for volunteers, and keeping the conversation alive on platforms where students were already spending their time. “It wasn’t just about posting trips,” she said. “It was about making sure people understood what was still happening.” 

The second time is more difficult 

Experience helped. But the ground had shifted in ways that preparation could not fully fix. 

Donor fatigue was real. Volunteer turnout was thin. Part of it was exhaustion; students who had given everything in the previous war simply had nothing left at the same intensity. Life continued in parallel with the war; studies, responsibilities, personal pressures, and for many students, the bandwidth for active volunteering had narrowed considerably. 

To work around it, the team adapted. They organized trips to locations that were easier to reach and that students’ families were more likely to approve. They reached out through personal networks rather than relying on mass announcements, texting friends directly and making the case one conversation at a time. And they kept the ask small and specific, knowing that an open-ended call to action was easier to ignore than a concrete, bounded one. “Even if you came for thirty minutes and wrapped five sandwiches, you did something,” Joe said. “People just needed to feel like they were contributing in any way they could”. 

That recalibration was not a compromise. It was a strategy; one that acknowledged the reality of where students were emotionally and practically, and worked with it rather than against it.  

Showing up, differently 

What Joe and Dana’s account captures is the difficulty of responding to a war that has already happened once before. The first time, urgency carries people. The second time, they have to find other reasons to move, and many could not. 

That students showed up at all, imperfectly and in smaller numbers, while managing their own exhaustion, is worth naming. The AUB UNICEF Club understood that crisis response does not always look like full mobilization. Sometimes it looks like three people, or a text to a friend, or thirty minutes in a kitchen. In a second war, that type of recalibrated solidarity may be the most honest form of it there is. 

Theirs is one of many student initiatives that first took shape during the 2024 war and continued into this one, a testament to a student community that has learned, across two wars, how to adapt and keep contributing. To read more about student initiatives during the 2024 war, click here.

Yasmine El Berjawi

Specialized in citizenship education, youth engagement, and governance in the Arab region. She holds a double BA in Political Studies and Public Administration from the American University of Beirut (’24), with minors in International Law, Civil Society, and Human Rights. She received the FAS Mamdouha S. Bobst Award and the Dr. Randa Antoun Annual Award for civic engagement and public service.