The Founding Generation
The first school, the Education City masterplan, and a foreign university arriving roughly every eighteen months on terms nobody has published.
Qatar Foundation Alumni
A network for the people who built Qatar Foundation — the staff, not the students. Qatar Foundation has one of the best graduate alumni networks in the Gulf and nothing at all for the people who made it exist.
Why now
QF Alumni is a serious operation: a member platform with a directory, a job board, mentorship booking, a discount card, regional chapters in North America and, since June 2025, the United Kingdom. Its own words describe it as “a global network of former students.” Eligibility is graduates only.
There is no equivalent for staff. We searched in English and Arabic — former employees, ex-staff, reunion, LinkedIn groups — and found nothing but the graduate programme, recruitment pages and data brokers scraping names. The people who negotiated the university agreements, drew the masterplan, ran capital projects, opened the schools, built the institutes and absorbed around eight hundred redundancies in March 2017 have no home anywhere.
And time has stopped being theoretical. The founder, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, died on 12 July 2026 — and neither Al Jazeera's obituary nor The National's mentioned Qatar Foundation or Education City at all. Fathy Saoud, who wrote the Education City masterplan and led the negotiations that brought the campuses in, died in 2022. Two founding deans are dead. Qatar Foundation publishes no leadership history, and its own twenty-fifth anniversary account of Education City contains no names, no dates and no account of how any of it was agreed.
Four generations
This is not only for the people who were there in 1995. Every era solved a problem the next one inherited.
The first school, the Education City masterplan, and a foreign university arriving roughly every eighteen months on terms nobody has published.
The science park, HBKU, the three institutes, the biobank and the genome programme — the shift from importing teaching to producing research.
Sidra and the National Library open; eight hundred jobs go; the blockade; and UCL Qatar closes after a decade.
The World Cup, Texas A&M's departure, congressional scrutiny, a new chief executive, the strikes of 2026 — and the founder's death.
This is for staff, contractors and the people seconded in — Qatar Foundation's own employees, the branch-campus administrators, the capital-projects teams who built Education City, and the people who worked at institutions that have since closed. If you were paid to make it happen, you belong here. Graduates already have QF Alumni; this is the other half.
The expertise we are assembling
A directory is only useful if it is searchable by what someone actually did. These are the areas we are building out first.
Qatar Academy and the school network, curriculum, the Academic Bridge Program and special education.
The branch-campus agreements, renewals, accreditation, and the running of Education City as one system.
QNRF, QCRI, QEERI, QBRI, the biobank and the genome programme — grants, labs and research strategy.
Building Education City itself: design, construction, the stadium, the library, Sidra and the estate that runs it.
Sidra Medicine from contract to hospital — clinical, operations, and the decade in between.
The science park, the tenants, commercialisation, incubation and the technology transfer around it.
WISE, WISH, Earthna, the Philharmonic, Al Shaqab, the library, and everything QF convened.
Finance, legal, government relations, communications, HR and the running of the foundation itself.
What being listed does for you
The directory is not a memorial. It is where the people who need what you know come to find you — and every approach reaches us first, never you directly.
An hour of your judgement, at a rate you set. Someone building the same thing pays to skip a year of mistakes.
Longer engagements assembled around a brief. You take the ones that suit you and decline the rest.
Producers looking for someone who was actually in the room, not another commentator.
Conferences and internal sessions that want the person who made the decision, not a summary of it.
Institutions that need someone who has already been through what they are about to attempt.
Journalists who would rather get it right than get it first.
Someone thirty years behind you, asking the questions you once asked.
Teaching the method to the people who will need it next.
Your email is never published and never sold. Every request comes to us, reaches you with the sender’s identity withheld, and goes no further unless you say yes. You set your own rate and keep 70% of every advisory fee.
Six ways to take part
Most members start with one and add another later. None of them requires you to be looking for anything.
Add your name, your period and your function to the founding directory.
One profile. Thirty minutes.Record one interview about something you built or lived through.
One hour, once.Take occasional paid advisory calls in your area of expertise.
You set the availability.Join an assembled team on a commissioned build.
By mandate, when it suits you.Guide someone earlier in the career you already had.
A few hours a quarter.Name the people who must be in this network, and open the door.
Introductions only.What we promise you
This is the part that matters most, and it is not negotiable.
What we are asking for
Join the founding directory: your period, your function, what you built. Thirty minutes.
Sit for one recorded conversation about something you made happen. It becomes part of the archive.
Name three people who must be in this network — and, if you can, make the introduction.
The founding directory
Members who asked to be listed publicly. Everyone else is here too, privately.
No names yet. The first will appear here as members are approved.
Tell us what you need. We pass it to them with your name withheld, and they decide whether to take it further. We come back to you either way.
Add your name
Five questions, about ten minutes. Nothing you write here is published — it goes to the directory, private by default.
Qatar Foundation Alumni is an independent initiative created by former colleagues. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a property of Qatar Foundation, and it is separate from QF Alumni, Qatar Foundation's own network for graduates. The Qatar Foundation name is used here only to describe who this community is for. If the foundation chooses to support the project, that relationship will be stated openly on this page.
If you helped build any of this, you belong here — and so do the people you worked with. Please pass the link on.