International Solidarity Day invites the world to reflect on how cooperation, justice, and mutual responsibility can shape a more inclusive development future. As Dr. Yossef Ben-Meir, President of the High Atlas Foundation (HAF), emphasizes, solidarity starts with individuals and emerges through collective engagement that transforms those aspirations into shared progress. In HAF’s approach to participatory development, solidarity represents a relationship rooted in listening, negotiation, and long-term collaboration. Through these locally driven processes, personal agency and community wellbeing become fundamentally connected, and forms a solid and equitable basis for development.

Solidarity must be personal and community. President Yossef reflects, “If we don’t create the structures that allow local voices to continuously shape public action, then we are not really able to build lasting solidarity.” HAF understands solidarity as an essential element that must be integral to the experience of development. Its IMAGINE empowerment workshops have engaged 7,597 individuals, women in eight regions and 25 provinces, reflecting on livelihoods, water, land, and economic inclusion. In this approach, solidarity allows people their individual needs in collective decision-making to shape what is built, how it is built, and for whom. It requires frameworks that protect the process of people defining their goals, refining them, and translating them into action with long-term support.

International Solidarity Day should challenge us to rethink whose voices shape the future, whose priorities define development, and whose systems carry weight. President Yossef said that solidarity is a responsibility to create pathways that uphold dignity and shared agency across generations. HAF and Morocco offer a living laboratory for this vision. It reveals that transformation begins when institutions are willing to learn from the ground up, especially when governments embed empowerment in governance, when donors fund the process rather than the product, and when communities move from beneficiaries to powerful builders.