Lina Khalifeh

Bullied from a young age and always getting into fights, the parents of Lina Khalifeh, at the time 5, decided to enroll her in cousin's taekwondo school. According to her, taekwondo taught her how to be confident and disciplined. With the goal of representing her country in the Olympics, she earned her black belt at the age of 15 and became one of the best athletes in her weight category in Jordan. However, due to her my grandfather being a Palestinian refugee, she was rejected.

After this set back, Lina Khalifeh started to over train, injuring herself in the process. At the age of 22, she torn her ACL, and after 2 surgeries, she did not recover well. Doctors informed her that she could not do martial arts anymore. She described this period as “the lowest point of my life”[1]

After finding out that her friend was abused by her family, she decided that since she could not fight professionally anymore due to her injuries, she would use her combating experience to teach other women how to fight. She started out in her parents' basement in 2010 with only 2 clients, but then, after two years she decided she should expend her class. She started out by learning the basics of business, she enrolled in of the Supporting Entrepreneurs and Enterprise Development Seminars (SEEDS) – a program designed to support women entrepreneurs start or grow their business. In partnership with the USAID and the Business Development Centre in Jordan, plus she learned from Julie Jones, her Phoenix mentor. After learning the fundamentals about how to grow a business, she labeled her growing foundation “SheFighter” with the main goal of empowering women from all aspects (physical, emotional, and mental), and pushing gender equality by spreading awareness and raising their physical intelligence through sports, Martial Arts and Self-Defense, and to do so Lina Khalifeh focused both on physical fighting and discussion about what  women deal with in their daily lives. She found it difficult to do so due to nature of the male-dominated society in Jordan, according to her, some women were afraid of change and preferred to follow culture and religion. But the foundation still found success, training many women in Jordan and across the world, some being disabled. “Shefighter” became an international entity having expanded to more than 35 countries.

Lina has also worked for four years as a marketing manager in her family's firm in Jordan, where she manufactured educational items (white boards, black boards, electronic boards, and so on) and marketed them abroad.[2]

Some of the many Conferences Lina was invited to speak at:

The Business of Fashion Summit 2019,The Economic World Forum 2019, Women in the World Summit 2019, Dragon Fly 2019 Thailand, European Development Summit 2018, European Parliament 2015, One Young World 2016, Concordia Summit (Virtual) 2020, Los Angeles Tribunate (Virtual) 2020 and BMO Bank (Virtual) 2020.[3] She was also selected by the She Entrepreneur program to present her work to the Swedish royal family.[4] She was one of the "leaders of social change" presented by Barack Obama at the white house.[5] She was featured at the TED conference as part of the TEDWomen conferences to talk about her work.[6]