From Community Space to Emergency Response: Beit Aam in Wartime Lebanon

Returning to Emergency Response

When the war on Lebanon escalated again in March 2026, civil society groups across the country moved almost immediately to respond. Donation drives reopened, volunteers mobilized, community kitchens started operating, and supplies were collected for people who had been displaced from their homes.

For many of the people doing this work, however, this was not their first time. Less than fifteen months earlier, they had already responded to the large-scale displacement caused by the 2024 escalation. Some initiatives were newly created in 2026, while others were drawing on networks and experience built during the previous war.

One of them was Beit Aam, an alternative community and cultural space in Beirut founded in 2023. Beit Aam was not created as a relief organization. It was established at a time when similar spaces in Beirut were disappearing, providing students, young people, artists, activists, and others with somewhere to work, study, rehearse, organize activities, attend talks, or simply spend time. Its regular programming includes theatre, cinema clubs, conferences, discussions, and other cultural and political activities.

During the 2024 escalation, that role expanded. Beit Aam opened its space to relief initiatives, hosted a community kitchen, provided storage space for supplies, and allowed other groups to use it for meetings and coordination. When the war escalated again in 2026, the experience meant that Beit Aam already knew how to shift into emergency response.

“We were able to respond immediately because we had experienced this before,” Dima El Ayache, co-founder of Beit Aam, told us.

Beit Aam’s connection to the community around it was central to the response. “Our first instinct was to be there for our extended community and provide as much help and aid as possible. Many people remembered us from the previous war and contacted us, so we felt the need to respond,” Dima said.

The differences between the two responses became apparent almost immediately. In 2024, Beit Aam had mainly relied on in-kind donations. People donated mattresses, blankets, clothes, cooking supplies, and other essentials. Many of the same people were being asked to donate again less than two years later, and a large part of what they could spare had already been given away during the previous war. Beit Aam therefore began accepting monetary donations as well.  

Beit Aam distributed sleeping kits containing mattresses, blankets, and pillows, alongside food parcels, hygiene kits and, when possible, medicine. It also paid particular attention to supplies that tend to receive less attention during emergency appeals, including sanitary pads, diapers, milk, and baby formula. At one point, Dima recalled, around 1,000 packs of diapers could be distributed within three days.

Dima also raised another issue that affected who could access shelter and assistance in the first place. Palestinians, Syrians, and migrant workers were not always welcomed into shelters. Beit Aam therefore made an effort to work across nationalities, including through migrant centres and among displaced people living on the streets in Biel and Horsh Beirut.

Much of Beit Aam’s needs assessment therefore happened directly through the people affected. Shelter focal points contacted the team, displaced people reached out themselves, and volunteers identified needs through what they were seeing on the ground. The needs of someone living on the street in Biel were not necessarily those of someone in an official shelter in Beirut or an unofficial shelter in the mountains, and while government assistance was more concentrated in official shelters, much of Beit Aam’s work focused on unofficial shelters and people living on the streets, where Dima said significantly less aid was reaching.

Coordination Through Community Networks

During the first weeks, there was no single mechanism telling grassroots groups who was working where or providing what. Over time, the groups themselves began figuring it out. If Beit Aam knew that another initiative was concentrating on food parcels, it could redirect its own resources elsewhere. Dima gave the example of Haven for Artists. Rather than both organizations spending limited resources on the same supplies, Beit Aam could contact them when food parcels were needed and concentrate on another gap. This division of work developed gradually as organizations became familiar with one another’s activities. “There had not previously been an umbrella for communication,” Dima explained.

Beit Aam’s connections with other actors also reflected the different layers of the response. Its relationship with the diaspora was largely direct and informal. People abroad would contact the team to say they wanted to organize a fundraiser, arrange it themselves, and then send the proceeds to Beit Aam.

One issue facing emergency response that Dima highlighted is that the work was increasingly concentrated among the smaller group of people who remained involved from the beginning. The same applies for donations. “If you donated $500 in 2024, would you still donate $500 in 2026?” Dima asked. For many people, the answer was no, or at least not at the same level. They had already donated money and belongings during the previous war. The financial situation in Lebanon had not suddenly improved in the months between the two escalations.

Diaspora networks became increasingly important as local individual donations slowed. People abroad contacted Beit Aam to organize fundraisers, including events in cities such as New York. Dima explained that even relatively small fundraisers became significant when several were taking place abroad, particularly once individual donations had become scarce.

This combination of volunteer fatigue, donor fatigue, and repeated emergency mobilization points to a problem that cannot be resolved simply by asking civil society to become more resilient. Dima believes grassroots initiatives will continue to be among the first actors to respond during emergencies. They are already present in communities, they know the people they are assisting, and they can often act before larger organizations complete the processes required for intervention. But this does not mean that emergency response should depend on them. 

Preparing for the Next Emergency

For a country that has repeatedly experienced war and mass displacement, Dima argued that Lebanon should have an official emergency response that is faster, broader, and capable of coordinating directly with the people already working on the ground. Shelters can be identified beforehand. Their locations, capacity, facilities, accessibility, heating, bathrooms, kitchens, and available equipment can be documented. Municipalities can know which buildings could be opened. Civil society groups can have established channels through which to communicate needs and avoid duplication.

There is another part of Beit Aam’s response that is easy to overlook because it cannot be counted in mattresses or food parcels. Even while carrying out relief work and moving between different locations, Beit Aam continued some of the cultural work for which the space had originally been created. People continued organizing activities where those affected by the war could gather, make music, perform, write poetry, express what they were experiencing, or simply sit together.

Perhaps the part of the response that stayed with Dima most was seeing who continued to show up. Some Beit Aam volunteers were themselves displaced. They were living through the same uncertainty as the people receiving assistance and, in some cases, needed support themselves.

“They needed help themselves, but they continued to help others,” she said.

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