Founded in 1958, the Social Work League — known to its members as الجامعيون الدروز, "the Druze university graduates" — began as a small circle of young graduates who believed that real social solidarity has to be built on culture and shared responsibility, not charity alone.
The League belongs to three generations at once: the ones who built it, the ones who run it today, and the ones it is still investing in. It was never meant to be a one-time act of charity. It was built as productive, ongoing work, grounded in genuine commitment and real guidance, in service of promising university youth.
At its core, since the day it was founded, the League's aim has never wavered: human development, community education, and a standing fight against ignorance and backwardness. From its earliest years, the League set out to close the gap facing young people and make up for whatever was missing in how the community cared for its own children — and that commitment has taken different shapes as the times demanded. In its first years, it meant securing hospital beds for those who needed care, doing so before Lebanon's own Ministry of Public Health had a program in place. Later, it meant guaranteeing housing for its female university students, so that distance from home was never the reason a young woman had to give up her education. Today, that same commitment lives on chiefly through the League's university student support program — helping students not just get into university, but stay there until they graduate.
Our mission centers on higher education: helping students find the right path of study, opening doors to university they might not otherwise reach, and standing behind them — materially and morally — until they get there. But a community grows through more than financial support. Since our earliest years, the League has invested just as much in bringing people together directly, through lectures, gatherings, and conversations that keep our culture alive and connect one generation to the next.
Everything we do traces back to a few founding commitments: supporting Druze university students, financially and morally; spreading knowledge and culture, especially among the young; offering legal and civic guidance where families need it; and pushing back, consistently, against ignorance and the neglect of education in any form. None of this has ever been only about money — it has always been, and remains, about showing up for the people who make up our community.
The League's story starts with a handful of names its members still call the "Golden Register": Samir Abou Hamzeh, Mounir Abou Ayyach, Chafic Abi Saïd, Walid Abou Mershed, Souad Hammadeh, Chawki Ghrayzi, Raouf El Ghosseini, Halim Hamad, Nabih Rachid, Farid El Rayes, Atef Saad, Salah Salman, Issam Naaman, and Mona Nweihed — a group later nicknamed the "new Ikhwan al-Safa" for the value they placed on knowledge, unity, and integrity of purpose. Dr. Atef Saad became the League's first president in 1958.
In those first years, the League's idea of service was hands-on and immediate: securing hospital beds for community members who needed care, at a time when even Lebanon's Ministry of Public Health had no comparable program of its own. As the community's needs shifted, so did the League's focus — housing was arranged for female university students so that leaving home was never the reason a young woman's education had to stop.
What began as informal, direct support for a handful of people grew, decade by decade, into a structured institution built around education. By the early 1980s the League had formed a dedicated Higher Education Encouragement Committee to run its growing student loan program, and kept it running even through the hardest years of Lebanon's civil war, when many organizations were forced to pull back. Between 1982 and 1987 alone, the number of students receiving League loans nearly quadrupled, from 29 to 104, helped along by fundraising within Druze communities abroad, particularly in the United States.
Today, more than 66 years after that first meeting in 1958, the League's founding conviction hasn't moved: that a community's progress is measured by the depth of its culture and the reach of its education, not by numbers alone, but by how far it can lift the people who make it up.
The Social Work League is officially established with a mission to serve and support the local community.