As of March 2026, ongoing conflict and successive waves of displacement have forced over one million individuals in Lebanon from their homes, including an estimated 370,000 to 390,000 children.
A significant number of public schools and community spaces are now repurposed as temporary shelters, often operating beyond capacity and under strained conditions. While humanitarian interventions have primarily focused on life-saving assistance such as food, shelter, and medical care, the psychosocial and emotional needs of children remain critically underserved.
Children affected by displacement are experiencing prolonged exposure to instability, loss, and uncertainty, with limited access to structured support systems that address their emotional wellbeing. This gap not only impacts their immediate sense of safety and expression but also has long-term consequences on their development, learning capacity, and social integration.
Addressing these needs through structured, evidence-based psychosocial interventions is therefore essential to support children’s resilience, restore a sense of agency, and promote their overall wellbeing in crisis-affected contexts.
Today I Would Like to Be A Tree combines artistic practice, storytelling, collective participation, and public engagement to support emotional expression, and social connection among children living in crisis conditions. The project is designed as a mobile and adaptable intervention that can operate across schools, shelters, and underserved regions with minimal infrastructure requirements. Through participatory art workshops and collaborative creative processes, children are encouraged to reconnect with imagination, and engage in collective experiences that reinforce belonging and agency.
Image Credits: J.K.Moussa
Today I Would Like to Be a Tree uses participatory drawing and collaborative artistic practice to give children affected by war and displacement in Lebanon a space to express what they have lived through.
Led by artist Abed Al Kadiri, the initiative brings collective drawing, storytelling, movement, and large collaborative paper installations directly into schools, collective shelters, and underserved communities. Sessions are mobile and require minimal infrastructure, so they can reach children where they are, including in environments where conventional support is scarce.
GOALS + OBJECTIVES
Accessible psychosocial support.
Deliver mobile, art based sessions that offer children emotional support without depending on clinical settings or fixed facilities.
Collaborative artistic archives.
Build a lasting record of children's voices and lived experiences through their own drawings.
Artistic and community engagement.
Share the work publicly through exhibitions and engagement platforms that connect affected communities with cultural institutions, artists, and wider audiences.
Agency, confidence, and belonging.
Strengthen each child's sense of self and place within a group.
Emotional expression.
Give children a safe way to communicate feelings and reduce social withdrawal.
Continuity.
Sustain creative engagement beyond individual workshop sessions.
A LASTING TESTAMENT
Image Credit Cliff Makhoul
At the core of the project is the transformation of the collective paper drawings into a series of leporello artist books that preserve and contextualize children’s visual responses to war, displacement, memory, and imagination. This phase is deeply rooted in the artistic and curatorial practice of Abed Al Kadiri, whose work has consistently explored themes of conflict, collective memory, migration, and cultural preservation through publishing, artist books, and collaborative archival practices.
The continuous paper rolls produced during the workshops are carefully transformed into leporello format artist books, allowing the collective drawings to remain physically connected as uninterrupted visual narratives. Each roll is divided into two interconnected surfaces: the children’s original drawings remain preserved on one side, while the reverse side is developed through artistic interventions by invited Lebanese and international artists, many of whom have personal or collective experiences related to conflict, displacement, exile, or memory.
The development of the leporello series builds directly on Al Kadiri’s previous large-scale collaborative projects, including Cities Under Quarantine | The Mailbox Project and This is Gaza, Palestine/ The Mailbox Project, which brought together artists from across the Arab world to reflect on isolation, crisis, and shared human experience through artistic exchange and publishing practices through intergenerational trauma.. Drawing on his expertise as co-founder of Dongola Limited Editions, a publishing platform dedicated to artist books and contemporary visual narratives from the Arab world, this phase positions the children’s drawings not as temporary workshop outputs, but as cultural and historical documents worthy of preservation, visibility, and artistic dialogue.
Through this process, the initiative creates a collaborative artistic archive that places children’s voices in direct dialogue with established contemporary artistic practices. These interventions are designed not to overwrite children’s expressions, but to respond to, preserve, amplify, and contextualize them within broader cultural narratives around resilience, movement, loss, and belonging.
CREATING IMPACT
Image Credits: J.K.Moussa
In 2026, Today I Would Like To Be A Tree has already served over 1,000 children across 32 schools, shelters, and communities in Lebanon. The need is far greater. Communities across the country are asking for the program, and your support will help us answer them.
Your gift brings art materials, trained facilitators, and mobile sessions to children living through war and displacement, giving them a place to draw, move, tell their stories, and be heard.
Every contribution also helps turn their drawings into collaborative artist books and exhibitions that carry their experiences to audiences worldwide and raise further support for their families and communities.
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DONATE AND SUPPORT
Donations to Today I Would Like To Be a Tree are tax deductible through its U.S. fiscal sponsor,
Opus 1 Foundation.
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