How do we design an inclusive future with refugee teens?
Breaking News! The world is not a sphere like we had thought. The world is pyramid shaped. Those on top have. Those on the bottom have not. This is not just about wealth or power. The pyramid factors in things like faith, gender, geography, education, age, race, pretty much everything.
Yet, words like inclusive are pulling ahead to be the buzzword of 2020. What does inclusivity look like in refugee education? How do we design a world that is more equitable and less top down?
Hello Future, founded by EHF Fellow Charlie Grosso led a global youth design thinking hack-a-thon for teens and refugees, introducing them to systems level thinking, empowering them to generate and implement solutions of their own design to ensure that we can reshape the world towards equity and inclusion.
Charlie Grosso left a lucrative and growing career in media and communications in 2015, spurred by a growing interest in the growing refugee crisis. She moved to Turkey to listen and learn more from the recently displaced Syrian refugees about how she could help.
By building relationships with local refugee communities she quickly gained insights. Many have smartphones, they have good internet and are paying upwards of 20% of their income to be connected to the web. They have great potential, but are cut off from the basic digital literacy to be enabled to realise this potential.
“Many refugees aren’t aware they can use their device for education. They don’t know what they don’t know. They use their device and the precious connectivity for facebook and WhatsApp. Digital literacy is an essential skills needed to transform someone from a passive observer into an active participant of this 21st Century. It is disorienting when a 15 year old teens asks in all earnestness, ‘How do you Google?’ They are supposed to be the generation of digital natives. We need to re-examine our assumption of a “digitally native generation.”
It was with this insight around the need for digital literacy that her organisation Hello Future was born. For the past 3 years she has been developing educational programmes and partnerships to build digital literacy skills of young refugees around the world.
What happens when you introduce design thinking to refugee teens to solve the challenges in their communities?
As COVID began disrupting all in person programmes this year, Charlie and her team pivoted and brought all of their programming online.
In June, Hello Future launched a 7 day Design Thinking hackathon in collaboration with another EHF Fellow Katy Greenier. The hackathon had over 60 youth, 6 teams from Arbat refugee camp in Iraq and 5 teams from the US, competing and learning from each other. In addition to introducing the youth to the design thinking methodology, part of the goal was to help the US teens learn more about refugees and shift their perception.
Watch the short video about the challenge and meet the teams.
Teams were tasked with identifying local community challenges brought on by the COVID pandemic and come up with possible solutions. They had 7 days to work through the design thinking methodology going from empathy and insights to problem identification to prototyping to testing and ideation with support from a global network of mentors and judges.
The results? Surprising.
The learnings and outputs were surprisingly in many ways. Much of the value of the event came through the global connectivity, bridge building and mindset shifts. Charlie saw many ‘aha’ moments of empathy from both sides. She witnessed youth from the US realising their Syrian peers half a world away struggling with similar problems - and vice versa.
Katy, CEO of DSIL enlisted coaches from DSIL’s network to help coach the kids. Together they rallied other EHF Fellows to serve as judges. It was a small ask for these judges. 1-2 hours to view videos, give scores and record a response video to give feedback to the teams.
What they didn’t anticipate was how much impactful the judges' feedback was for the Arbat teams. It was the highlight of the whole event, beyond how well the teams performed and ranked in the overall competition. The refugee teens felt seen, heard and acknowledged --- a tiny step in the deep work of an inclusive world. They were visibly connected to global collaborators and the Hello Future team saw changes in their mindset --- they are doers, innovators and creators. They are not victims. They are more than refugees.
What’s next?
Charlie and her team are unleashing the human potential within refugee youth by training them in essential digital, entrepreneurial and leadership skills so they can be active citizens and solve urgent issues within their own community, issues that they are deeply knowledgeable about, instead of waiting for those on the top of the pyramid.
These mindshift changes, one person at a time, one team at a time, one event at a time, are the seeds that can grow into big impact. These are the results that are pushing Charlie and Hello Future forwards into their next phase of development.
Building on the hackathon programme and global partnerships, Charlie is developing more course curriculums to focus on supporting small business development and entrepreneurship within the refugee community. Refugees engage in economic activities like everyone else. They are perhaps the largest and most often overlooked market. The potential is immense.
“Small businesses are the backbone of all economies. We are stripping back an MBA programme to its essentials and creating an incubator that is focused on small business creation rather than technology based incubator/accelerators. Our program starts with the idea of digital literacy and builds from there, taking our students all the way through an alternative MBA that can change the fabric and wellbeing of entire communities.”
“We want to create a blueprint to reimagine the educational landscape for refugees.”
The education program Charlie is designing goes beyond refugees. She is designing a program that can adapted to serve any underprivileged, underserved community including those who are under-resourced in developed nations, like New Zealand.
To learn more about Hello Future check out the website.