In this episode of Be Your Change, I talk to Vava Angwenyi about the importance of empowering women-owned coffee farms. Being aware of where the coffee we drive comes from critically impacts women’s financial independence in Africa and Columbia. Vava was born and raised in Kenya. She decided to be part of the solution, and in 2009, she founded the social enterprise Vava Coffee. Vava saw smiles where others only saw poverty, corruption, and fears. She noticed the voices of coffee farmers and their need to be heard.

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Women “make up around 43 percent of the agricultural labor force in developing countries”. They are especially disadvantaged and usually have more limited access to both information and services. They hold more responsibilities around the house and are now taking over more and more of the agricultural workload as men migrate out of town to find work.

The Challenges Faced by Women Coffee Farmers

In developing countries, women constitute around 43 percent of the agricultural labor force but face various disadvantages, such as limited access to information and services. As men migrate for work, women take on more agricultural responsibilities, especially in coffee farming.

Coffee is the second most traded primary product in the world.

Coffee is the second most traded primary product in the world. And the global market is estimated at more than $100 billion. So imagine what our impact could be if we were paying attention to where our cup of coffee comes from. Vava Coffee works with smallholder farmers. They are also traders and exporters of green coffee in bulk. Green coffee is coffee beans that haven’t been roasted yet. The beans are entirely raw and taste quite different from regular roasted coffee. It has a milder, more ‘herbal’ flavor.

Educating Women Coffee Farmers

Vava Coffee educates coffee producers with the knowledge they need to have better market access and understand what goes into producing good quality coffee and negotiating better prices for themselves.

Integrating women and Youth in the supply chain

Vava decided to help coffee farmers transform their lives. She focuses on incorporating more women and youth into the supply chain. They mostly work with young people, with a specific focus on women. They have run successful training for young women and currently have an ongoing project with the Michigan University unit and the Williamson Davidson Institute. So they’re conducting a research project in Colombia regarding their role in empowering women in the coffee supply chain.

Women coffee growers don’t own much land worldwide, and it is a problem

It isn’t easy to find out how many women work in the coffee industry worldwide. However, it’s more about how we can, for example, have women own land, rather than just being the laborers on the farm.

89% of the labor on coffee farms, especially in Africa is provided by women.

Latin America is slightly opposite in terms of men being also the ones that provide the work. But in Africa, 89% of the women on the farms pick the coffee cherries. And they’re not the ones who receive the payment for their work. When the husband finally delivers the coffee to the factory, women never quite get the earnings.

Women own less than 20% of all the land on the planet.

UN puts it at less than 10%. However, women make up more than 50% of the population. And 400 million women farm and produce the majority of the world’s food supply.

How to break the cycle of land ownership for women coffee growers?

Vava is working hard to change this statistic and shift this unbalance. One of the initiatives is to have men empower women by giving them a few coffee trees. There are a lot of land issues. Of course, it’s tough for some of these societies to have women own title deeds to the land. We’ve managed to have groups of men in different growing regions give the women coffee plants.

Women can take care of the coffee plants and have their source of income separated from the men. Women’s coffee is also branded differently. And that way it fetches better prices for women.

According to the world economic forum, female farmers lack equal rights to own land in more than 90 countries.

To give you an idea: land and property can form up to 75% of a nation’s wealth. Ironically, 75% of the world’s population cannot prove they own the land they live or work. 90% of Africa’s land is still wholly undocumented. It tells us exactly how big our problem is, and women are the first affected by this matter.

The impact of owning land for women coffee growers has a ripple impact

Women owning property affects reducing domestic violence, but also on humanity as a whole. Women invest 90% of their income in their immediate families. And when women own property, they tend to have more power in the house and better access to food. And finally, there’s a visible better outcome for their children.

Women tend to be better managers of financial resources

I mean, women, historically have been better managers of financial resources and they make a lot of the decisions in the household anyway as to where the money goes on what’s needed in the family.

There’s more work to be done to break the barriers to have women be brave enough to take some steps and, for example, have their own bank accounts. But also reinvest in separate projects that might be more beneficial to their households.

It is shocking to learn that more than 1.3 billion women on the planet don’t have a bank account. It is roughly 30% of the world’s women population.

The Impact of Vava’s Social Enterprise On Women

In the Rift Valley in Kenya, Vava worked with roughly 400 women. Vava’s coffee launched the first fair trade-certified women’s coffee in the whole of Africa. She helped them create their website and social media. Vava’s company also trained women on coffee quality and supported them to get funding by applying for a facility loan. They also looked at the family unit to help women get biogas units for their homes, improving the overall quality of life.

biogas is basically a way of processing cow dung. Like you’re basically, converting cow down into clean energy, which the women are using to cook instead of cutting firewood.

Biogas is a type of biofuel. It is produced from the decomposition of organic waste. It makes it environmentally friendly. And in Kenya, most of the cooking happens with firewood. Women and girls pick up the wood, which leads to lower school enrollment rates for girls and risks of health issues related to smoke inhalation and life fires. Families can do sustainably because each of these families has cows. The most significant impact on women has also been through training interns; some are now full-time employees. Mentoring women now helps them have careers in the coffee industry, and they have access to various opportunities.

What are some of the challenges Vava Coffee is experiencing?

There are more systemic challenges. We’re trying to fight a system that is really not working for producers and that’s really not been working for a while. So through our work, we are trying to influence specific policy changes.

It is tough because a lot of the systems that we’re trying to break up have been set up for a very long time way back to the colonial era as in most of these countries.

Another one is that it is a very capital-intensive industry. Vava is continuously trying to fundraise and look for large amounts of capital to enable them to run their distribution in the markets they are approaching.

Who’s been your inspiration?

Vava: I draw inspiration from various places and various people. I can say that I’ve had any like good mentors physically, but I think I draw inspiration from other entrepreneurs—those whose done amazing things. I read a lot and listen to many podcasts and stories about being an entrepreneur. Any entrepreneur in the world who’s managed to succeed despite all odds is, for me, is a fantastic person. So I read a lot of these stories to get inspired.

I mean also just drawing inspiration from how great the world is if we all just worked together to make it a better place. Yeah.

Do you think your upbringing was a factor in your desire to help? Where I grew up, entrepreneurship was not something you do after getting two degrees in school. I should have continued my math career and been a successful finance person. However, of course, I do say that. I mean, I wouldn’t be where I am. I was not brought up with discipline because entrepreneurship requires a lot of discipline. My parents are responsible for that level of discipline and commitment to something. So, I draw and get a lot of energy from people around me who do great things.

How can our listeners and readers help women’s coffee initiatives?

Just buy coffee, drink coffee, supporter, farmer. Start asking questions when you go to your coffee shop and find out where they get the coffee. Find out how they source it. Consumers can really help shift some of the things that we’re working on in the industry if they start asking more questions.

Additional Resources

• Learn more about Fair Trade Coffee
• Visit Vava coffee for more information and buying their women coffee directly.

Are you interested in learning more about fair trade? We recommend listening to some of our previous episodes, Episode 13: How AKS is Promoting Gender Equality in Pakistan and Episode 10, with Karrie Pukstas, a brand activist at Kroger on How Fair Trade Empowers Women To Be In Charge. To learn more about Fair Trade, you can also listen to Fair Talks with one of our guests Elisha Chan. 

Support women by purchasing from these brands that are supporting women.

Can you tell us who you are?

I am the co-founder of Five One Labs, a social impact incubator based in Iraq's Kurdistan region. We support young people from all diverse communities in the Kurdistan region to launch scalable and innovative businesses.

Why did you launch a social impact incubator in Iraq?

The interesting thing about the Kurdistan region of Iraq if you're looking at it on a map, it's in between Iran and Syria. It's kind of in-between Kirkuk and Mosul. It's a place surrounded by conflict, but it is a relatively safe and secure region.

About a million and a half Iraqis and about 250,000 Syrians have been displaced.

Unfortunately, that number will probably be growing soon just because of what's happening in Syria.

Juliette Roy: Syria has been undergoing tremendous disruption over the last 9 years. The war is currently the second deadliest of the 21st century.

In March 2020, the estimate of the total number of deaths in the Syrian Civil War varied between 384,000 and 586,100.

Alice Bosley: These are incredible people, right? These are people with college educations and professional experiences and hopes and dreams and talents.

And, when we think about displacement, we think about these people as either kind of poor and helpless or as burdens on society. And Five One Labs wanted to flip that on its head, right?

These are assets. This is human capital that has been displaced into a place. Often entrepreneurship is an incredible way for people to overcome some of the challenges in accessing jobs at their level. You may not have connections, you might not have kind the opportunities to break into the job space, but if you have these skills, then you're able to launch a business. And so we provide training and office space and mentorship and connections to help these amazing people to launch amazing businesses.

How did you come up with the idea of creating a social impact incubator?

Alice Bosley: I think it's two things. The first thing is that I first moved to the Kurdistan region of Iraq in 2012, which was a very hopeful time. It was before ISIS, before the drop in oil prices, things were really blooming there. And I had this amazing opportunity to work at a university, and universities are full of these like awesome young people right there. They're full of hopes and dreams and just really excited about life. I made friends with many of these incredible students that over the next couple of years, saw those hopes and dreams kind of shattered because of ISIS, because of the kind of conflicts between Baghdad and Erbil and, and any number of things.

A first experience running a social impact incubator

The first thing was a deep understanding that there's this amazing human talent not utilized well. And secondly, I worked at the UN refugee agency in their innovation office and ran an internal social impact incubator for the United Nations. It was incredible. Seeing how going through an incubation program, getting the support, the training, and some seed funding to launch innovative solutions to solve problems can be extremely effective in all different sectors.

Working there really sparked for me the kind of the question, how can we do this for refugees? People had great ideas internally, but they already have a lot of support. If you're working in the United Nations, you're pretty good and.

And I thought this is wonderful, but there's this large part of the population that is getting absolutely no opportunities to do this.

A desire to help a community in need

Alice Bosley: How can we serve people affected by conflict to solve the problems that they see in their communities. And so this kind of knowing that the human capital exists, seeing it, being friends with those people. On the other hand, seeing kind of how startup incubation and idea incubation can be so effective bring those two things together. I decided that I had to launch something like Five One Labs. I found an incredible co-founder. She had personally been affected by the conflict in the past. She had family in Syria. The two of us together, this was something that we were really passionate about,

How did you get funding to launch the social impact incubator?

Alice Bosley: We launched Five One Labs during grad school, actually. I had left the United Nations and decided I wanted to study entrepreneurship in conflict-affected areas. I met my cofounder at grad school, and we started, started Five One Labs in our second year. We wrote our dissertation on basically incubation models in different contexts. I interviewed everyone from the African entrepreneur collective based in Rwanda to Y Combinator in the Bay area to understand the different models.

We also ran our pilot in grad school supported by our university. We managed to win our first $15,000 from Columbia University. And that how we were able to start.

Then, we launched a crowdfunding campaign. We were supported by the Tent foundation with a grant of $50,000. We had close to $80,000 in total when we moved to Iraq. And we started on our social impact incubator program.

Can you talk about your impact on the community you empower?

We started so small. It was a team of three of us. We ran our first startup incubator in Erbil, the capital of that region, with seven startups. So you can imagine three people working with seven startups.

From there today we have a team of 16 people in two different offices. We run a coworking space in Soleimani, which is over 8,000 square feet.

We host yearly investor trips where we bring investors from around the region and worldwide to come and see the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

We've worked with I would say 46 founders intensively through our social impact incubator programs. And then we've reached over 1,800 aspiring entrepreneurs through boot camps and workshops and things that universities.

We have a smaller group of founders we work with very intensively for a three-month full-time incubation program.

Did you learn Arabic?

We operate in the Kurdistan region. The most spoken language there is Kurdish. The social impact incubator's mission is to focus on supporting people who had been displaced and affected by conflict. We actually started in English. A lot of the majority of universities actually teach in English. Many people have a great working level in English.

Each of our startup cohorts for the three-month incubation program was 50% people displaced and 50% locals. That means that half our cohort speaks Kurdish and the other half Arabic. It's pretty political.

Instead of choosing one language or the other, which would mean that we were choosing one population or the other, we started in English.

That has worked really well. We're also very aware of the fact that the people who speak English are also those who are highly educated and pretty elite. And this year, we launched our first Arabic language incubation. It is much more focused on IDPs, people who have been internally displaced as well as refugees. And that has been going really well. And this year, we're going to start our first Kurdish language program. And so we're running our social impact incubator in all three languages, basically, English, Kurdish, and Arabic.

What is your business model?

We're actually a nonprofit because we work with early entrepreneurs. We struggled with it at the beginning. We wanted to be a social impact incubator for-profit because it's much more sustainable. But because we work with idea-stage entrepreneurs, there's not a lot of profit in that. I think a lot of people are seeing that private sector development is the key right now in Iraq. The majority of our donors have been governments or multilateral donors. We are funded by the German government, GI Zed and the German development agency, and the US Consulate in Erbil. We are doing research funded by the Dutch government.

Other revenue streams, we

• have a coworking space and membership.
• Run master-level classes that people have to pay to get into.
• Start to move more into the investment space, and we're trying to figure out what that means for us. We've been speaking to a couple of partners about potentially launching a seed-stage fund ourselves, and that would mean that we have a for-profit arm or whether we get a finder's fee and we help connect investors with startups.

What made you move to a country so culturally different from yours?

Alice Bosley: My family moved to Saudi Arabia when I was eight years old. My dad is a doctor. Whether it was a midlife crisis or he just wanted an adventure, who knows. I spent a lot of time growing up in Saudi Arabia. I fell in love with the Middle East in a lot of ways. It kind of feels like home. So I went to university in the Bay area. After I graduated, I was trying to figure out what would be next. I applied to Peace Corps. It was like, you can be an English language teacher. It didn't seem super impactful or life-changing.

I remember I was looking at a job board, and there was a listing that said, are you young and motivated and interested in moving to Iraq? Email me. I swear I am the only person that responded to it. I was like, I am young and motivated. And I do. When I moved to Iraq, around the world, but especially in the United States, there is a particular view of what Iraq means.

As someone who absolutely did not support the war, did not. I mean, I just feel like the U.S has done so much wrong in Iraq. My first thought was like, I don't want to be another American messing up that country.

I talked to this person and learned about more, and the region where I am is semi-autonomous, so it even has basically its own visa system.

I have a residency card for the Kurdistan region, but I am legally not allowed into Baghdad. So that's like how separated these two regions are. I walk around on the streets by myself. I take taxis at night. It is very stable. My parents come to visit me and hang out. And so I just moved there and realized how different it was. Not just that region. I know so many entrepreneurs from Baghdad. There's amazing stuff happening in Mosul. There's amazing stuff happening in Basra.

We are a part of this basically Renaissance in Iraq focused on innovation and entrepreneurship and technology.

Are investors interested in learning about Iraq’s business opportunities?

We just hosted an investor trip.

An investor from Bahrain called us and he was like, you've gotta be kidding me. Right? Like Iraq. There's no entrepreneurship in Iraq.

And so I think it's so challenging, and no one believes it. And yet, despite all of that, the evidence is that there are incredible young people that are doing this without any support.

There are tons of entrepreneurs in the Bay area, but it's also a lot easier to be an entrepreneur. There are role models. People are saying you can do this. And in Iraq, literally, everything is against you, but still successful people are doing it. And that is pretty addictive. So part of it might be the adventure that it was just a fun place to go to at the beginning.

But then I think once you get there and, and just see the people who are doing such badass things while the whole world is discounting this whole country, I mean that that to me is what's really amazing.

Can you share an example of one of these people who I've really impressed you?

One of the entrepreneurs won on our demo day. We provide seed funding to three of our entrepreneurs. She won the largest amount of seed funding from our last startup cohort. This woman is just amazing. She is originally from Baghdad. And moved up to the Kurdistan region when things started getting pretty unsafe in Baghdad. I mean there were kinds of bombs going off on her street and her family. Eventually, it was like, this is crazy. She went to university up in Kurdistan. She used to play women's basketball in one of the first women's basketball teams in the country.

Dada Babysitting

Then she got pregnant and realized that there was no good babysitting service in Iraq. People leave their kids with grandparents or relatives or whatever. She basically thought that's great, except my parents have a very different mindset than I do. They're much more traditional. They have a particular view of what babies should be doing. I am much more modern. And she saw that all of her friends felt the same way. And so she launched a babysitting app called dada, which is the first in all of Iraq. It connects young parents with trained babysitters. They understand how to play with babies, stimulate them, and teach them things even at a young age.

Fatima

Fatima is a kind of an example of the just amazing resilience of people. Originally from Fallujah, she was displaced many different times. She was displaced from Fallujah to Kuwait, from Kuwait back to the bus route, and then finally to Erbil. She was in our first cohort. Fatima was a pharmacist. She owned her own pharmacy. This is a woman who was highly professional, highly skilled, and when she was displaced, she was not allowed into the local pharmacist syndicate.

Alice Bosley – And so she wasn't able to have the same job that she had before. So she decided that the future of the world is coding. She taught herself how to code. She has two fairly grown kids. This is like an older woman who was like; I'm going to teach myself how to code. This is the key to unlocking kind of the future. And from there, she decided to teach kids how to code. And so she launched a business called tech teams, which teaches young, young kids and teenagers how to code with the goal of getting them good enough that by the time they graduate from university or decide to start working if they don't go to college and t they can be kind of competitive on an international scale.

She now operates in a number of different schools and summer camps and has training programs all around the country. She's planning on expanding to different cities and she just has this great model. She's just a natural entrepreneur. She was forced into being an entrepreneur because she couldn't follow the career path that she had before. She rocks it.

Her goal is to change the future of Iraq by teaching young Iraqis how to have the skills necessary for the future.

Women entrepreneurs usually have a critical impact on their community. It seems women are playing a large role in Iraq as well.

Part of the social impact incubator, Five One Labs was founded by two female founders. I'm sure that that has something to do with it.

From the very beginning, we decided that in each of our startup cohorts, 50% of the startups would be female-led. And it wasn't hard to do.

I actually feel like there is less of a challenge in Iraq than there is in the United States and getting women into tech and into entrepreneurship.

We spent a lot of times supporting incredible women entrepreneurs and we actually launched a program called the female founders' fellowship for growth-stage women enterprises because one saying one thing, even if just as many women as men come into entrepreneurship, it definitely is challenging to be a female entrepreneur in Iraq.

The challenges of being a woman entrepreneur in Iraq

There is a reputational barrier. So if you were a man and you were a supplier of my company and we went out to have a business meeting and someone saw you and me sitting together, that is just not appropriate. Our families would find out and people would think of a date or something. If I have to buy things in the bazaar or the older part of town, it's not appropriate for me as a woman to do that alone. Face-to-face marketing, handing out flyers or talking to people. All of these things are less appropriate for men to do than women. And if you're from a very conservative family, then just the idea of going out on your own is challenging.

We actually have put in many additional things for women to help them overcome these additional barriers that they face. Because it's just important to talk about it. I mean, there are differences. And so how do we make sure that those differences don't stop people from starting businesses?

Because like you said, a woman who starts a business, she's taking care of her community; she's taking care of her parents; she's taking care of her kids. There's this outsized impact when it comes to supporting amazing women leaders.

What did you put in place to help women in the social impact incubator?

We have three main ways.

• We created the incubate women's initiative to bring in women leaders from the community every other week to talk to our women entrepreneurs. They have very intimate conversations where they share tips and challenges. They create this supportive community, which is really important because often their families are saying like, you are crazy. Please get a job. This is not a job.
• We have started linking our female entrepreneurs with interns who can, as silly as this sounds, just go with them to meetings or to do marketing or to go into the bizarre, just literally having an additional person so that you are not alone doing these things. It changed the whole story. Before, we would have our female entrepreneurs asking our male entrepreneurs to accompany them to do things for them. It gives you a lack of freedom and a lack of being able to do things on your own. And so we just link everybody with an intern who will basically follow them around, go do the marketing that they can't do these sorts of things.
• As long as they are willing, we are putting our female entrepreneurs out there as role models. We get them on the radio, on TV shows, in local newspapers. More and more, there's this idea that women are business leaders and are going to change the economy in a lot of ways.

And then just little things like making sure that our women entrepreneurs have women mentors who understand what they're going through and can really kind of work with them to overcome it.

How is it for an American woman with so much freedom in the U.S to get your head around the tradition?

I grew up in Saudi Arabia, which is much worse. Or at least it was. Things are changing in Saudi Arabia now, but there was a lot of getting used to when I was there. Where I live in Iraq is not as conservative as many other places in the Middle East. Having a female-founded social impact incubator is actually not that strange. People in general, though, not all the time respect us. We have meetings with the government. I would say it's not as bad as you would imagine it to be in general.

Where do you get your drive?

I have no idea. I think that's a great question and I should think about it more. It's just, it seems to me obvious that you only have one life, you know, and I don't want to waste any time because who knows?

Because I'm impatient, I know people who have had accidents. I think everybody, the older you get, the more you know that life is a very special thing.

And so I think at an early age, I just knew I didn't want to waste what I had and working for a company where I didn't feel drawn to the mission just didn't seem worth it.

It's not like doing social impact work generally pays, but in terms of feeling fulfilled and excited and challenged every single day, I think that is something that social impact work gives you. Right? You're working on the hardest problems, sometimes in the hardest places, and it is a constant headache and a constant kind of knots that you're trying to entangle.

The most exciting thing is waking up every day and being like, wow, how on earth are we going to do these 19 things that we have to do? And having no idea and still trying to do it. The other thing is that I just love working with badass people.

I really care about other people and supporting them to reach their goals, which is why I've always been drawn to entrepreneurship because it's not about you, right? It's about the success of the people, your customers. It's about the success of your entrepreneurs.

And so I think I would be just as happy serving entrepreneurs in like New York city as I would in Iraq, but in Iraq, they don't have any support. And so it just seems like that is the right place to be.

I'm not pretending to be doing something insanely amazing, but I think to work with young people and to tell them every day like, you can do this, you're just as smart as that person in the Silicon Valley. You are just as motivated. You have just as much grit, just as much determination. It's going to be harder for you because you're trying to launch a business in Iraq and because there isn't as much support in Iraq, but if you really want to do this and you can do it. And I think getting to be the cheerleader for these amazing young people trying to change the world. That's pretty awesome.

One of our entrepreneurs had a baby and then had all of these family issues. And as a woman there, you're expected to take care of your family. And so, you're leaving your job, or you're leaving your business to do all of these things. Then you come back, and you keep working on your business. They're just so many additional hurdles that you wouldn't see from people working in the U S. I mean, not across the board, but I think there are just many additional things you have to deal with. And for us, when we're talking with investors or other people, it's really important to share the context so that you look at this entrepreneur and you're like, Oh well, they haven't made as much progress as we would expect from a similar entrepreneur in another place.

And we're like, yeah, that's great.

But also like their business has survived ISIS, like their business has survived the whole economy of this region crashing their business has survived the Iraqi government shutting down all of the airports for six months. And the internet. I mean, just last week the internet across Iraq was shut down for a full week because of protest. These things happen all the time.

And so one thing we try to do is just let people understand that they may not be as far as what you would expect from someone in New York City, but if you consider everything that they have that their business has survived through like this is pretty damn impressive.

Do you have any insight to share on how to follow one’s drive?

I think the one thing I would say, and I'm sure that everyone listening to this has heard this before. I think especially in the United States, amongst young people now and by young people, I mean anyone under the age of 45 years old, there is a drive to be perfect at things, to be really good at things and when you are trying to start something new or, or whether you're trying to have a social impact. There are all of these reasons why you don't feel like you're necessarily going to be the right person to do it or that you have all of the expertise necessary, or that you can be perfect at this thing.

And I think what I would say is just stop waiting for that moment to come because it will, it will literally never come and as long as you are not harming people, I think you will always have a good impact.

So I would say just start doing whatever it is that you want to do even if it's a part-time thing, even if it's three hours on the weekend. There's never going to be some magical moment in your life where you're like, Oh yeah, like now I can do it.

In the first six months, we started the social impact incubator. The only reason we kept going is that my cofounder and I kept convincing ourselves that we weren't actually going to do it. It was like we're just going to test it out one more time. We'll just run one more pilot. And at one point, I remember just staring at her and saying like. This is actually a thing. Like we're actually going to do this.

And I remember we were both terrified because how can you ever be ready to move to Iraq and launch a startup incubator, the first startup incubator in Iraq?

Like there's never going to be a point where you're like, yes, I am fully ready to do this. It doesn't change the fact that, first of all, you're probably more ready than anybody else's. And second of all, your mediocre attempt is still better than nothing happening, and you will learn, and you will get better. So just do it. Whatever it is.

In this podcast episode, we are talking with RefuSHE CEO, Jaydan Adlin and board member and a refugee herself, Esperance Gikundiro on what the reality is for refugee girls in East Africa and how RefuSHE has become a safe space and a home for women to rebuild their lives and reach their full potential.

Today, I am excited to speak with two women changemakers who are sharing with us their work and journey on helping girls refugees to rebuild their lives: Jailan Adly and Esperance Gikundiro, board member and a refugee herself.

• Modern Slavery: A Harsh Reality
• What is RefuSHE?
• The refugee crisis: a global challenge
• From refugee to RefuSHE board member: the story of Esperance Gikundiro
• How to get involved in supporting refugee girls?
• Learn More

Modern Slavery: A Harsh Reality

A $150 billion industry

The International Labor Organization estimates that more than:

• 40 million people around the world were victims of modern slavery in 2016.
• Out of these 40 million, 25 million are forced labor and 15 million forced marriage.
• 152 million children aged between 5 and 17 are in child labor – roughly half the US population

Additionally, Human trafficking is a $150 billion industry: it includes sex trafficking, child labor, and modern slavery meaning people who are forced into situations.

Women are disproportionately affected

• 80% of the Human trafficking population are women and girls (29 million)
• Women count for 99% of the victims of forced labor in the sex industry and 84% of forced marriages.

The Refugee Crisis And Modern Slavery Go Hand-in-Hand

Human trafficking is intrinsically linked to the refugee crisis. In 2015, more than 65 million people were displaced. When you are forced to leave your home, and even your country, you become highly vulnerable to any form of crime and exploitation.

Refugee: Awareness And Collaboration Are On The Rise

Although these numbers are heartbreaking, the hope is that many organizations and people are now collaborating to end this massive problem of human trafficking. RefuSHE is one of the organizations on the ground making a difference in East Africa.

What Is RefuSHE?

Jailan Adly is the CEO of RefusHE and she talks to us about her work.

RefuSHE is a global organization that works with refugee girls in East Africa.10 years ago our founders started RefuSHE because they were working in the refugee community in Kenya and saw that there was a gap in services when it came to unaccompanied separated or orphaned young refugee girls. These girls really needed a much more holistic approach. They needed protection and ways to gain the skills needed to be able to take care of themselves and their family as they grew up. The organization is about 10 people in the US but about 60 staff members are actually in Kenya. That's where our operations are.

RefuSHE: An Impact On 30,000 Girls and Women Refugees

Directly and indirectly, we've touched almost 30,000 girls and women. We run direct programs for young women and girls, including our safe house. We provide temporary safe shelter for the most acute security concerns. Girls stay in the safe house anywhere from three to six months. Some of them need to stay longer because every case is different in terms of security needs.

The Different Programs Helping The Refugees Girls

School Education

We also run an accelerated school. It's a four-year program, starting with basic literacy. As most of the girls coming in are not from Kenya, we bring them up to speed on English and Swahili. We also teach them basic mathematics and then, as they get into more advanced levels, science and history. We're now at the point where our curriculum gets them ready to sit for the Kenya board exams. This means they can then transition to a Kenyan school. It also prepares the girls that might be resettled out of Kenya to be able to easily slide into the high school system or be prepared for college as well.

Daycare Center

We have a daycare center on-site. Many of the girls that come have suffered sexual violence and a lot of them come pregnant from that. The daycare center allows them to go to school while their kids are taken care of on the campus and receiving the nutrition they need, and education as well. Mothers remain close to their kids and we prepare the kids for integration into Kenyan schools at the same time.

A Community Outreach Program for Refugee

We have a community outreach program where we actually work with refugee women and girls that might not be coming to our campus, including some of the older refugee women. We also have programs for men and boys as well in the communities around sexual-based and gender-based violence.

You know, if we want to break the cycle of violence, we also have to have these conversations with men and boys.

Oftentimes, considering the cultures that they're coming from, these are not typical conversations. Our case managers have really worked out in the community to break some of these stereotypes, taboos and be able to have these conversations.

Developing Entrepreneurship

We have also helped women form savings groups so that they can pool their money together, help one another out if there's, you know, one family that is in need. And then also use those savings groups and seed grants that we provide to be able to start and support their own businesses.

Being refugees, oftentimes they're unable to get work permits. And so, the way for them to be able to support their family is more personalized entrepreneurial businesses like tailoring, jewelry making, hairdressing… It's already competitive out there in the marketplace, and we want to help them break into that and so they can serve the other refugee community members as well.

Protecting Girls And Women Refugee Outside The Safe House

Our women are also there to provide support to our girls that live out in the community. Those that aren't in the safe house. We put them either in foster families or in group housing. And then the women add a second layer of kind of mentorship. They also then lookout in the community if a new girl shows up that's unaccompanied or separated or has lost her family and refer them to our programs. So through that program as well, we've hit families indirectly. And so those are, those are kind of the numbers that we've been able to reach.

Safe House: An Undisclosed Location To Protect Girls and Women Refugees

Our safe house is separate from our main campus. It's an undisclosed location and we move it actually every two years. It provides safe shelter for minors, in our case, mostly girls, even though we do have a few young boys under the age of 10, who don't have families and have security concerns. Security concerns can range depending on each girl's particular story, what country she's coming from. In some cases, they're political refugees coming from places where there's actually a warring tribe and so there might be people after them. That is why they need a shelter outside of the community that's undisclosed so that they're not found. Or they have suffered massive trauma, especially around kind of sexual trauma.

The need for healing, trauma counseling, psychosocial counseling is really important to do in a safe space where there are only women and are well taken care of.

Rebuilding Family

The Safehouse is not just a shelter, but it's really a family we build. Girls are provided with food and hygiene kits. Mothers have access to diapers and baby formula. The case managers take them to medical appointments to make sure that they are healthy and well taken care of.

Legal Support and Advice

We have a legal and advocacy program manager that works on their cases to either help them get their paperwork in order and hopefully be resettled out of Kenya. Especially for those with security concerns, Kenya is close to their home countries. And so, it's not necessarily the safest there either because they are a little bit too easy to find. For those cases specifically, we work with implementing partners to try to get them resettled out, as much as possible and kind of away from the safety concerns.

Artisan Collective, More Than A Scarf: An Healing Program To Empower Girls Refugee

The artisan collective is a program where girls make scarves and other items which are then sold under the RefuShe brand, both online and through various different outlets. It was created to be a training and healing program.

This artisan collective program is just one component of our larger girls’ empowerment program. In addition to the classes part of the accelerated program, the girls are also taking vocational training classes. We've been focusing on textiles: girls are learning how to sew and make various different types of textiles.

Once they graduate from that, they have the ability to apply to the artisan collective and join as a member for two years. It's essentially, a slow ramp towards starting their own business. It's the opportunity for them to hone the skills that they learned in class, be able to actually create products.

It's more than just working on the sewing and the tailoring and all of that. It's really a healing mechanism for them. So, we try to find a balance between creating products and maintaining this healing space as well. We sell the products as a way to reinvest into our program and to provide them with a stipend. Women and girls are unable to earn an income because of their refugee status. So, this is a way we can provide them with a stipend, help them start to save money in a savings account so that they can start their own personal business as well. All the proceeds are reinvested into that particular program.

The Refugee Crisis: A Global Challenge

A Declining Refugee Resettlement Rate

The big thing that we are faced with right now as an organization is you know, back when Esperance was in our program 10 years ago, most of our girls were getting resettled. Their cases were acute and severe enough that they were typically the ones that were prioritized for resettlement.

We have been seeing a global climate of declining resettlement rates, especially in the US, Western Europe, Australia. That has impacted host countries like Kenya, Jordan, Mexico, where refugees are still going to come because when your family is in danger, you will do what it takes to get your family to safety.

And that puts a lot of strain on a country like Kenya because they have to take care of their own citizens as well.

Hosting Refugees: A Constant Struggle For The Host Country

There's a constant struggle that Kenya has to go through. How much can they provide refugees while they need to take care of our own citizens? The problem doesn't go away by not having refugees come to a European country or the US. It still exists. And so, we need to be able to provide support not just to refugees, but also to host countries.

We need the global community to come together and give them the resources they need to deal with this problem. It's still a massive impact, not just on them but regionally and then globally. If a country like Kenya is unable to safely manage to take in that many people, it'll destabilize Kenya, which will destabilize East Africa, which will eventually destabilize the entire area. There's a ripple effect globally.

Breaking The Culture Of Dependency

We know that most of the girls won’t probably get resettled outside of Kenya at this point. We need to be able to advocate to help the Kenyan government see the benefit of supporting refugees within Kenya. Then also provide them with longer-term durable solutions to being able to earn an income so that they are able to self-sustain while living in communities around Nairobi. So that we can break the culture of dependency.

If we aren't able to give refugees durable solutions, then the only option is a humanitarian culture of dependency model. It doesn't help anyone out, neither the host country nor the refugees themselves nor on a global level.

A refugee is not a status, it is the consequence of unstable countries

The refugee crisis is a large, unruly problem that seems to be so complicated that it's hard to kind of figure out how to fix it, right? By the time someone is a refugee, so many things have gone wrong to get to that point, right? That it seems almost too late at that point. What happened in the country of origin? How did that destabilization happen? Was it economic, was it environmental? Was it political? All of these things are kind of the root cause that by the time someone is a refugee, you're almost in kind of the Band-Aid solution mode.

A Refugee Want The Same Thing As Anyone Else

Refugees want the same things that we want for our families. And there are ways to actually, as an individual, support a program like ours, or Catholic relief services, or these other organizations that are working to directly work with the refugees. To say: how do we take what is a very difficult situation and make the best of it to help get these families back on their feet. Help start a new beginning, right? We can always close a chapter and start a new one. So how do we make a better start for refugees to be able to kind of take it to the next level, be able to process whatever chapter they have come from, and be able to look towards a better future?

From Refugee To RefuSHE Board Member: the story of Esperance Gikundiro

Esperance Gikundiro is a board member today. She shares with us her story of how she first met the organization. Esperance was in the first generation of girls the organization worked with when they started. She referred to RefuSHE by UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency.

Esperance, When Did You First Met RefusHE?

When I was in Kenya and registered as a refugee., I was without my family. That's why I was referred to RefuSHE because as you know, we help young refugee girls who are not with their families who are under 18. I happened to meet all the qualifications at that time.

I think that's a common question with a common answer because of safety.

People have the wrong assumption of what is a refugee. You have a normal life or mostly a better life than the life you have after becoming a refugee. I grew up in Rwanda most of my life. I grew up having anything I needed with my family. My family had to move out of Rwanda because of safety. There's always war constantly. So, my family moved to Congo because of war

Refugee and Poverty: A heart-Breaking Reality

People assume because you are no longer in your country is because you are poor, but not really. If anything, you have maybe a life of dream, most of the time in your country. But when you leave, it's very hard because in every country you have to go to school. For certain people, you leave your country with a certain level of education and then when you get to another, especially in the US. My dad came here with a master's degree. Now he works in a sewing company. So, it's very hard. It's hard to go back to school for people in their fifties, learn the language and start all over again.

Becoming a refugee doesn't take your intelligence away. It just took your freedom away. That's how I see it.

My dad's been here for three years now. He can speak English now and maybe even if he ever one day finds a professional job, it is never going to be equivalent to what he had in his country.

I don't blame somebody to assume that refugees are poor. It's true. Once you become refugees, you become poor because you have nothing left.

Esperance’s own journey

moved from Rwanda to Congo to Kenya and I'm now in the U.S. I guess I'm going to China next, I'm joking. Every case is personal and individual. So, it depends on the case of that person. Certain girls don't get the chance to leave Kenya. So, most of them, graduate from the program and continue to get help to start their life in Kenya instead of getting resettled. But as Jailan mentioned, most of our girls have security issues. Most of them ended up having the opportunity to leave Kenya.

A Place Called Home

I actually lived in a safe house for more than three years. That's why Jailan is saying every case is different. Once you're there for the first few months, it's hard because you are from different cultures, religions. Language is the main barrier, more than anything because we come from different countries. We can't speak to each other, but we have to live in the same room. We have to use the same shower and everything. You have to cook food that maybe you never ate in your country or that they never ate in their country. We try to put in the middle of that what works for both of us, but we can't communicate. So, learning the language was the best thing for us because we end up learning so fast. We speak in Swahili and English at the same time.

You get attached to the home. You feel like it's home for real, you really do feel like it's a home. That's what is important to us. It’s a reason why I'm still a part of their RefuShe family today because I know it's different. There are so many different organizations, especially in the US that say we help Refugees. It's a different story to know this really helps refugees because I've been a part of it as a student. I've been a part of it as a refugee girl who needed help and I've been a part of it as a volunteer. I became a board member and now I'm stepping into a new position. To me, it's almost personal, because I know it's real and I have seen the girls' life changing so much. The process of being resettled was a blessing. And I know the ones who are in Kenya, they are in good hands.

Gaining Independence

Being in a safe house for two years, I think we create our own families there. We tend to get attached to that family. So, once you turned 19, honestly, they intend to give you a chance to start a business. We had entrepreneurship classes and then I was trained for seven months.

After seven months, if you're ready, you choose which type of business you want to start. One time I received $300 from the organization, which is so much money there. There is an auditor who comes every now and then to make sure your business is going the way you say it and then they help you grow in your business. It is really helpful to become independent. I think this made me the woman I am today, honestly, because then you know, you can do a business, you can start this, you can start that.

A Traumatic Experience

It's almost unreal. Half of the girls went through trauma that you cannot even describe. So, unfortunately, it's supposed to be a blessing having kids. But when it comes from rape, it doesn't… the pain doesn't go away.

So for most of our girls, unfortunately, they've been in those situations. They've been raped, they have kids.

Healing By Making

So, when we do these scarves, this is not just a scarf. That's something she's doing with her own hands, knowing that she has the power to change that material, you know that color. And then make it a scarf for a bag or a dress or a jumpsuit. But for the girls, it's more than just that, it's different. It's more than just what you see.

How To Get Involved In Supporting Girls Refugees?

Esperance: Mostly supporting or being involved in organizations like RefuSHE or any other organization like Catholic social services. Those are the organization I was attached to. But there are so many organizations that help refugees. I know RefuSHE is the only organization that is doing the type of job we are doing.

To be involved doesn't mean necessarily you have to spend your money. It could be put your time in and understand the story of the refugee girls cause every girl has a different story. Once you are involved in that type of organization or that type of environment, you become aware. And then, like now, we are raising awareness because we know better as an organization. So, I feel like once you get, you try, you learn.

Make The World A Better Place For Refugee Girls

I'm 19. I want to see more girls having success stories, non-necessarily success stories of coming to the US, but success stories of creating their own business and be very self-independent in Kenya. I consider that success more than me coming here because I had the resources. I have a chance to find a job without anybody questioning where I'm from. But in Kenya, unfortunately, that's not the case.

I want to make sure we focus on making sure those girls are going to have a standard life without worrying "where's my food coming from, tomorrow.

Esperance is continuing her journey and is hoping to open her non-profit to be the voice of the voiceless.

I feel like I'm in a position to speaking for those girls who can speak for themselves. I focus on the girls because unfortunately, we have monthly needs. We take for granted in the US, but these are girls somewhere maybe in a rural area in Rwanda or there's a refugee girl in Uganda who can't, unfortunately, have access to sanitary essential products. My main focus is to provide basic needs for refugee girls in Uganda right now.

I want to add visit our website at RefuSHE.org so you can understand what we do and help us raise awareness to make sure people understand what an organization like RefuSHE does because I know it did my change life.

3 Ways You Can Help

Those are great, tangible, easy ways to help support our programs.

• Donation: The best support is monetary because that we can then reinvest that back in our programs in Nairobi.
• Purchasing our products is always incredibly helpful.
• Hosting events in your cities where you're able to, you know, host a scarf party, talk about RefuSHE, sell some scarves, be able to change the narrative and perception about refugees and talk about the vulnerabilities that refugee girls specifically face.

Learn More

• The International labor organization
• RefuSHE to find out more about their mission and different companies.
• Dressember
• 40 million in modern slavery and 120 million in child labor
• UNHCR
• Sex Trafficking and the Refugee Crisis: Exploiting the Vulnerable

“We achieved a really important milestone this year, which is 1 million people lifted out of extreme poverty. So it’s been really exciting to be on this journey and to see the impact on the lives of the people that we’re serving.”

Who is Dianne Calvi?

Dianne Calvi is the CEO of Village Enterprise. She started the non-profit in 2010. So far, she has grown the organization from 13 employees to now 200. Over time she has also helped more than 1 million people transition out of extreme poverty. Village Enterprise works towards achieving the United Nations’ first sustainable development goal…to end extreme poverty by 2030. And the UN defines extreme poverty as people living on less than one dollar and 25 cents a day. As of last year, more than half of the world’s population living in extreme poverty is located in sub-Saharan Africa…and that is who Village Enterprise works with.

Who does Village Enterprise work with to reduce extreme poverty?

We work with mostly women, first-time entrepreneurs living in rural areas of Sub-Saharan Africa. This we do by providing them with all the resources to start small, sustainable businesses and savings groups. We do that through a poverty graduation approach. This involves providing the seed capital in the form of a grant instead of loans. After that, we provide them with really extensive training and mentoring by a local business mentor. We also help them form savings groups and help them get access to formal financial institutions.

By doing that, we really transform both the household and the community, lifting them out of extreme poverty. We see improvement in nutrition, and household savings, education and healthcare. We also see changes in subjective wellbeing, like better mental health, increased standing in the community, greater agency and empowerment.

You know when women are empowered and have access and control over financial resources, they invest in their children. And that is going to have a transformative impact for generations to come.

Where does your inspiration to help people living in extreme poverty and particularly women in Sub-Saharan Africa, come from?

The United Nations set out to achieve some really ambitious goals around poverty, women’s empowerment, the environment, and food security. Statistics show that extreme poverty numbers are higher for women than men in Sub-Saharan Africa; 127 women aged 25-34 live in extreme poverty for every 100 men.More than half (56%) of urban women and girls live in slum conditions. They lack at least one of the following: access to clean water, improved sanitation facilities, durable housing, and sufficient living area. And yet these are important because to really have a better world for all, all people need to be able to access education, healthcare services and be able to lift themselves out of poverty.

And so the United United Nations set some really ambitious goals and the number one being to end extreme poverty. There have been some really significant trends in the last 20 years in the area of poverty. And one of them is that the rate of extreme poverty has come down significantly. But there are still over 400 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa living in extreme poverty. And that’s been the area of the world where it’s been most difficult, addressing this in this goal. And that’s why Village Enterprise has chosen to focus on Sub-Saharan Africa.

Can you explain where Sub-Sahara is in Africa and what the situation is regarding extreme poverty?

Sub-Saharan Africa is south of the Sahara desert and Africa and it’s a really vast area. It includes 46 out of the 54 countries in Africa and is the less developed part of Africa economically. But it’s a really rich area in terms of resources and culture and very diverse in terms of culture. So we work in Kenya, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But it is our goal to work in at least four to five additional Sub-Saharan African countries In the next three years.

That’s a big goal! So it sounds like you have a very big ambition forVillage Enterprise?

Yeah, we do have really big ambitions. So as I mentioned, we have transformed the lives of over a million people. And it’s our goal to raise that number to around 20 million by 2030.

I’ve heard that when we get women out of extreme poverty, they may reinvest up to 70% of their earnings in the community and in their children. Do you think this is correct, from your experience at Village Enterprise?

Yeah, that’s, that is indeed the case that we see with our women business owners. When women have income from their businesses, one of the first things they do is make sure their children are going to school. They pay the school fees and get them the school uniforms.

Women are especially making sure that their girl children are able to go to school. Oftentimes in Africa, the boys are the ones that go to school, and girls are left out.

The women are also investing in nutrition for their families. The children are eating more meals a day and more protein and we know that when children have better nutrition, it has an impact on the rest of their lives. So this is really breaking the cycle of extreme poverty by ensuring that children have healthy brain development or going to school and realizing their potential.

Based on a United Nations Women report, 15 million girls of primary-school age will never get the chance to learn to read or write compared to 10 million boys. And 48.1% of adolescent girls are more likely to be out of school than adolescent boys – 48.1%, compared to 43.6%.

Do you have a success story that you would like to share with us?

Sure! There are so many. In my last visit to the field, I went up to the Bidi Bidi Refugee Camp in Northern Uganda, one of the world's largest refugee camps. Over a million people are living in this area of Northern Uganda. They have come from mostly South Sudan, but also from the DRC. At the camp, I met a woman, Salome, and she told me her story of having to leave her homeland. She doesn’t know where her husband is and she had already lost one child. Salome had to walk for two months, with her seven children, aged between 1 and 10, carrying her one-year-old on her back the whole time. They kept walking, not knowing where their next meal would come from, not knowing where they would find water. It is just hard to imagine as a mother what that would be like.

On arriving at the Bidi Bidi Refugee Camp, they received provisions; some rice and some oil, and a tent for her and her seven children to sleep in. But no way to really make their lives better. And, you know, this sense of hopelessness, the sense of loss, and extreme poverty stayed with them. So when Village Enterprise came to the refugee camp, uh, she was really excited to participate in our program.

So how did you involve Salome with Village Enterprise?

Salome started receiving mentoring and training first. She had never run a business before and she said it was so empowering to her to gain these skills. Salome was also happy to participate in the savings group with other women. She formed a business group with two other women and decided to start a butchery business because there was no meat available in the camps. They used the seed capital to buy their first goats and they started running a successful butchery business.

And when I asked Salome about what was so empowering about this, she said, “Someday I hope to go back to South Sudan and, I won’t be able to bring this business with me. But they can never take away what I’ve learned through the training and my relationship with my business mentor. That’s something I’ll take with me forever.” So you see, it’s not just the ability to start the business, but it’s also all of the knowledge and the skills that they develop and have for the rest of their lives.

Wow, that’s just incredible! And what is the story behind Village Enterprise and how has the journey towards eradicating extreme poverty been so far?

Well, Village Enterprise was started in 1987 by Brian Lenhen and John Hestenes. They started it because they were really moved by the extreme poverty conditions that they saw when they visited Africa and wanted to make a difference. It was run for many years primarily as a volunteer organization, working through church communities.

When I came on board, I was the first outside CEO hired by the organization in 2010. When the board was interested in transitioning the organization from a primarily volunteer-run organization to a more professional organization. And really scaling up the impact that the organization had. So we’ve grown the organization from 13 employees when I started to close to 200 employees now. This year, we achieved a really important milestone, which is 1 million people lifted out of extreme poverty.So it’s been really exciting to be on this journey and see the impact on the lives of the people we’re serving. And we’re starting over 4,800 businesses and training over 13,000, 16, 13,000, 600 new entrepreneurs.

So that is about Village Enterprise. What about you? What was your journey that led you to this world of social entrepreneurship?

Well, I’ve always been involved with helping vulnerable and marginalized people since I was a child. I was always doing volunteer work with low-income communities, tutoring, working in homeless shelters. And I was born severely pigeon-toed and spent the first few years of my elementary school years in heavy metal braces and corrective shoes. I was ostracized as a child because of that. And as a result, I think I’ve always identified with people that have been ostracized or marginalized.

And I’m fortunate that I grew up in a family that really valued community service and encouraged me. From the time I was like eight years old, I was helping tutor kids and, and was part of a volunteer organization. And so I’ve done that all my life. I received an MBA, so I went into the private sector for several years and worked for high-tech companies like Microsoft. But I decided about 15 years ago that I really wanted to focus my career on the nonprofit sector. So I became the president of an early literacy organization about 15 years ago. I really enjoyed applying all the skills that I had developed in the nonprofit sector and the knowledge that I had acquired in the for-profit sector.

So I really feel nonprofits should be run like businesses, where we really need to focus on impact and efficiency and cost-effectiveness. And I think having experienced running businesses in the for-profit sector has really helped to inform the way I run Village Enterprise. As I mentioned, I was recruited in 2010 to run Village Enterprise and it’s just been an extraordinary journey.

I have seen many women come forward to help other women out of extreme poverty in my work. What’s your take on women leaders?

Yeah, I think what’s really exciting to see is women increasingly in positions of power where they can really make a difference. And I think as women, we do lead differently. I think women are more likely to empower others and provide opportunities for everyone in the organization to assume leadership positions. Women, I think, are more sensitive to issues around how the most marginalized are treated. And using a much more human-centered design approach, really getting to know the needs of the community. They also have less of a ‘we-know-what's-best-for-you’ and instead work with and listen to the community.

And I think what women also do is empower other women. So currently, four out of five of my C-suite leaders are women. And 75% of the managers in the organization are women. Uh, we really value, um, leadership at all levels, um, and, and look to women, uh, to be those leaders in the organization.

Lately, there has been an important societal shift towards impact investing in 2020. The younger generation is really questioning the companies they are working for and the impact companies have. There is also a really big kind of movement of people who want to align their values, personal values with their work.

Well, I think it just depends on the individuals. So I don’t think that there’s one solution. I think clearly working in a nonprofit is the most direct way to have an impact. You get to experience it every day and work with other people that are mission-driven. And so it’s just very satisfying. But I think if you can’t work in a nonprofit, you can volunteer. You can start a social enterprise or a for-profit organization that has a positive impact. Similarly, within a for-profit company, you can bring these types of values to the for-profit environment and help shift the mindset of for-profit companies from within. And I think all of those are very valuable and will help, you know, this social shift in a positive direction.

How can people who would like to support your mission can contact you?

Well, like all nonprofits, we rely on donor funding to do our work of lifting people out of extreme poverty. So we always appreciate donations from people that are interested in helping others help themselves. And we also look to getting the word out about the work that we do.The more people who know about the impact of this kind of work, the better in terms of promoting this type of work.

And then we have a very small need for volunteers. Our work is community-based, so we hire people from those communities and we don’t really have a huge need for volunteers in the field. But we do use volunteers to do things like providing us with legal services, accounting services and marketing services. So there are volunteers that help us every day and we really appreciate them as well.

Sidenote from the author

Talking to Dianne was a rewarding moment. What strikes me the most is her impact on so many lives and her driving desire to align her values and work life. It also brought me back to my childhood. I used to live in Niger when I was 10. Thinking back to this time, I realized how difficult it was for me to navigate poverty. Meeting girls my age, who were poor and didn’t have much. It seemed unfair. I wish I had more help to make sense of it if you can ever make sense of poverty. I remember feeling powerless because I wanted to help and I didn’t know-how. And I now believe that my role is to help amplify the impact of women like Dianne on society because they know how to make a difference and support them!

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To Learn More

• United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
• Extreme poverty currently measures to people living on less than $1.25/day
• 736 million people live in extreme poverty…but this website measures it as less than 1.90/a day. More than half of that number live in sub-Saharan Africa (413 million people)
• Since 1990 (so 20 years), a quarter of the world has risen out of extreme poverty and now less than the world’s population lives in extreme poverty
• As boys and girls get older, the gender gap in poverty widens further. Marriage, divorce, separation and widowhood also affect the poverty of men and women differently. Girls and boys who are married before 18 see higher poverty rates than those who are married later.

You can listen to the full interview below.

Laina talks with us about her journey to becoming an investor and the desire to change the path to leadership for many women.

• Background story: From a tech CEO to social entrepreneurs
• Women entrepreneurs supported by Angels of Impact
• Finding Investors to support women entrepreneurs
• Network Ripple Effect: investing money a small sum at the time
• What is impact investing?

Meet Laina, a social impact woman entrepreneur

I'm the co-founder of Angels of Impact, which is based in Singapore. And what we are, fundamentally connecting women-led social enterprises who are helping alleviate poverty, connecting them to investors as well as to markets. Angels of Impact finds women from around the world who are creating social and environmental change. They connect these entrepreneurs to big investors and big companies to buy their products and amplify their social impact.

What inspired your decision to found Angels of Impact?

I don’t come from a wealthy background. My mother was the daughter of a rice farmer. So I know what it's like to access the opportunities can hAnd I felt like I had a duty to pay it forward towards enabling others into social impact.

Angels of Impact finds women from around the world who are creating social and environmental change. They connect these entrepreneurs to big investors, and big companies to buy their products and amplify their social impact.

That is very interesting! Can you give us an example of some profiles of women that you're working with?

We have one remarkable woman who is working on restoring biodiversity in Indonesia. Her name is Helianti Hillman, and she is the founder of Javara. The company sells products like Biscotti, gluten-free pasta, jam, and many more. Helianti works with 50,000 farmers all across Indonesia. Helianti also has the idea of helping to alleviate them out of poverty so that small farm holders can continue to do farming rather than leave and go to the cities and trying to look for work. And she's doing amazing work which has a great social impact.

Where do you come in as Angels of Impact for Javara?

What Angels of Impact tried to do with her is to try to access markets for her. Team and I were able to get Javara products into the pantries of both Google and Facebook.

Is there any other woman entrepreneur you’d like to tell us about?

Yes. There is another lady who runs a bean to bar chocolate factory in Indonesia too. The woman, Sabrina Mustopo, is a former McKinsey (managing consulting firm) consultant but wanted to make the world a better place. Sabrina founded Krakakoa, a group that provides farmer education workshops. The workshops are on good agricultural practices and sustainable cocoa farming methods. Sabrina works directly with the farmers, helping them go up the value chain so that they can earn more and get out of poverty. And because she does bean-to-bar, they’re delicious quality chocolates. This ensures widespread social impact.

How Angels of Impact chipped in for Sabrina and Krakakoa?

Angels of Impact also got Sabrina’s products in Google’s offices. Google now gets a shipment of her company’s chocolates twice a month. Another way in which we came through for Sabrina is when she needed access to financing. We brought together a group of investors to help to access finance for her as well. This allows her to continue to do her work of social impact without worrying about the source of funding.

How do you find investors for women entrepreneurs?

We have this fundamental premise that many people out there actually have done well for themselves. But they all are searching for more meaning in their lives, and they want to do equally meaningful things. Some of them have contributed to charity, but being capitalists themselves and having made their money as entrepreneurs, they may feel a little bit awkward with just pure charity. They want to be more hands-on in their contributions. They want to help the business grow. So we began to look for people with that mindset. We point them in the direction of social impact business.

What has been your experience getting donors so far?

Initially, the way we positioned it was better than donations. So we could not guarantee maximum monetary returns from it. And for them, they were perfectly agreeable with that. This is because even better than donations and maybe getting the return on investment was the prospect of making a social impact. Now we're trying to take it to the next level of having people see this as a good investment. So this is how it's been viral so far. We call ourselves a network of entrepreneurs helping entrepreneurs. And I feel that this is a smart money movement. It's not just flowing money but opening doors and helping mentorship as well, creating social impact. And that’s a relationship that more people are drawn to these days.

A network of entrepreneurs helping entrepreneurs: What do you think fuels people’s involvement in your venture?

As we noted in part one of this series, impact investment is particularly rising amongst Millenials. One survey shows that 79 percent of millennials want to invest in ways that have a social impact and financial impact. People want to be part of a movement that is creating a more conscious society.

Many of them come to us saying,

Thank you. You know this is it made my life so much more worthwhile. I'm working at a bank or making lots of money. Or I'm running this company and made lots of money. But now I feel fulfilled because I can actually see people being lifted out of poverty and it makes so much meaning for that.

Those are the kind of people we look for, people who want to have more meaning in their lives. So that's why Angels of Impact. We don't just support women's social enterprise; we support those who are helping alleviate poverty.

That’s a very wonderful resume for your company. What about you? Has Angels of Impact done anything for you?

Angels of Impact also bring meaning into my own life. In a lot of ways, I see myself in the women I make investments in. My own family was very poor. My grandmother was a rice farmer in Singapore. And my family had to work their way up.

What did you do before starting Angels of Impact?

My professional background is in technology. I was CEO of one of the first tech startups in Singapore in the early 1990s. I have worked in 47 different countries, including Switzerland, the US, and Indonesia. As a woman, I had to work twice as hard to break the glass ceiling – because there was always an unconscious bias. So I very much empathized with how difficult it was to be a woman in a tech field and literally invisible and trying to make herself visible.

So what did you do next?

I went on to run my own company. I ran an e-learning company out of Singapore which provided services all around the region, including Australia, China and Vietnam. And in that process, I found entrepreneurship to be very empowering because I didn't have to go begging for a job. I created the opportunities, and I created opportunities for other people and thus created teams and created value.

But something was still missing even then?

Yes! Even though I was creating opportunities, I still felt like something was missing. I wanted to do more to help others. Because even though my family was able to lift themselves out of poverty, not all families are so lucky.

Where does your inspiration come from?

When I was very young, I watched Richard Attenborough's movie on Mahatma Gandhi. Mother Teresa was also one of my biggest role models, so I was always conflicted with business. I wanted to do some good, yes, but then I also wanted to do some good. So when I first started hearing about social entrepreneurship, I thought, what a brilliant idea. You know that you could use business fundamentals and do good. And one of the books that really changed my mindset was Professor Muhammad Yunus’ 'Creating a world without poverty' where it challenges economic theories. He challenges the fact that we need to restore dignity for the poor. You know they can help themselves. They are innovators. They are not passive recipients. This pointed strongly at social impact!

Could you break this down a little more?

You know, donating money is not that empowering. But when you invest money into a person or company aligned with the greater good, that is empowering both for the entrepreneur and the investor. It creates a better social impact. And that made so much sense to me, you know.

And so that's when I said okay, ‘How can I apply this network that I have already built up both in the business world as well as sort of the nonprofit world to be able to help others to do it?’ Right there and then, I decided that the best way to help others was to use my business know-how to enable women around the world to lift themselves out of poverty. I would help small women-run businesses find international investors.

The Ripple Effect: You are not alone

So I started by walking the talk by investing my own money. So even before I started Angels of Impact, I just talked to an entrepreneur and said, “You know how much money you need. What are you trying to do?” “Well, I'm trying to do this or that. And this is how much money I need.” The first one told me she needed $5000. I was like, “I can do $5,000.” The second entrepreneur needed $25,000. So I said, “Well, I can do $10,000.” And then I turned around and asked another friend of mine, “Hey, I'm giving $10,000 to this entrepreneur. Can you join me?” And she's like, “Yeah, of course!”

And that is how Angels of Impact started. The group became official in 2016, to give women-led social enterprises the finance they needed to grow into sustainable businesses. The social impact has been magnanimous since. Today the company invests in foods, drinks, and even sustainable fashion.

So, what amount of investment are we talking about for these types of endeavors?

Currently, because we're still in the early stages, we're using the lean startup methodology of testing the market as well. The Lean Startup methodology is a practice for developing products and businesses based on getting a lot of customer feedback very quickly. The idea is to shorten the amount of time it takes to develop a product. So we're doing smaller amounts anywhere from $50,000 to about $150,000. Okay. So that's sort of in the range where it's bigger than a micro-finance, but they're still too small for impact investors to be interested in. So the idea is, we helped them through this journey.

How do you then progress from the initial stage?

But in the process of helping them in that journey, especially when we open up markets for them, we're able to see where the real pain point is, you know? Is it that they don't have a team? Or not have enough equipment? Is it because the quality of the products is not good enough or maybe it’s packaged wrong? So that gives us the ability actually to learn with them. And it’s a mutual process, which makes it exciting for entrepreneurs to want to invest in this area because most of them are looking for social impact.

What is impact investing?

I noticed that as more people look for meaning, and as the popularity of impact investing rises, so does the broadness of the term's definition. I usually say it’s like an elephant; someone's holding a tail and they describe that as an investment, whereas someone holding the trunk describes that as impact investing. But everyone is right based on what they're holding and what they want to achieve.

Where do all these different approaches meet?

Different people have different expectations. So if some impact investors really do believe they can do good and do well at the same time, then that’s commendable. I don't think we should be talking about one particular definition of impact investing because I think people should state what their expectation is. Am I looking for a social return first and then at the same time want a sustainable business? Or do I want social impact first, and then I want a business that grows and gives me good healthy returns. Or do I want to have good healthy returns and some social impact at the same time?

You mentioned gender-based discrimination earlier. How do you maintain credibility at Angels of Impact against any discrimination?

As investors, people often do want healthy returns. And they’re more likely to invest in men to get those returns. People are less likely to invest in women-owned businesses. This is even though studies show that companies with women executives usually perform better than those led by men. To curb this gender discrimination, Angels of Impact vets its entrepreneurs inside and out – based on sales, quality of service and product, and customer satisfaction. I think we have tried to be able to eliminate some of these unconscious biases by giving data that is very credible. The data speaks for itself.

Any advice, especially for women entrepreneurs?

I strive to make leaders out of the women-owned companies that Angels of Impact works with.

The key to any good leader is empathy, humility, and the desire to do good for others. My biggest advice for women-entrepreneurs is to work hard, never give up. Women may have to work twice as hard, but we still can break the glass ceiling.

Additional resources

• What is Impact Investing?
• Angel of Impact’s website
• Krakakoa: fair trade chocolate from Indonesia
• Javara: sustaining forgotten food biodiversity
• Laina Raveendran Green
• Lean Startup methodology
• Gandhi’s Movie
• Mother Theresa

Poverty is one of the leading causes to mental health issues.

The United Nations number 3 goals of the 17 goals for a more sustainable world, is about well-being and health. To understand what it means in action to tackle goal number 3, we are traveling to Sante Fe, New Mexico, to meet with Meryl Lieberman. She is the co-founder of the non-profit Casa Milagro or House of Miracles. We are talking to Meryl today about her commitment and innovative approach to end homelessness and address mental health for homeless people in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

I had a grandma who was a Holocaust survivor who spent some time in mental hospitals. And when I used to act out, my mom would sometimes threaten to send me to one of those places. And so early on I made a decision that that's my life's work is to keep people out of those places. Meryl Lieberman

In this article, you’ll learn about

• Mental Health And Homeless People
• The story of Casa Milagro: A therapeutic community for formerly homeless people
• Stigma and homeless people
• A unique collaboration with other organizations

Homeless People in numbers: 2% of the global population is homeless.

About 2 percent of the global population or 150 million people are homeless. In the United States alone in 2019, more than 500,000 people reported being homeless…and the number of people experiencing homelessness in New Mexico is on the rise. From 2018 to 2019, the number of people living on the streets in New Mexico rose by 27%, one of the largest increases in the country.

Mental health and homelessness go hand-in-hand.

Meryl Lieberman believes mental health and homelessness go hand-in-hand. That is one reason why she opened Casa Milagro, a residential community for adults. She helps residents who were formerly homeless people and lives with severe mental illness. A community of caretakers lives in the house to help residents eventually transition to an independent life.

What is Casa Milagro? a therapeutic and residential community for formerly homeless people

Casa Milagro house of miracles is a therapeutic community, residential community, for adults who have previously experienced homelessness and who are living with a diagnosis of a severely disabling mental illness. And the reason they would even need Casa Milagro is that they haven't yet developed the confidence or the skills to live independently in a safe way, meaning remembering to take prescribed medications or to eat well, or to turn the stove off, for example. So we teach living skills as well as independent skills on how to foster community by cooperating every day.

Who are the profiles of formerly homeless people who live at Casa Milagro?

Several women who were either victim of domestic abuse and human trafficking are part of our community. Some of them had multiple personality disorders now called associative disorder and we've had several residents with that particular diagnosis. Some have severe depression or bipolar disorder; any people with a diagnosis of depression or bipolar can function beautifully in, you know, our culture. Others have been more limited in their experience and they don't have the confidence yet.

How did you start Casa Milagro?

We started out with six men and six women and then what happened was as people started becoming more gender-fluid, describing themselves in many different ways. Let me just describe the house. It's an H-shaped house and each end of the letter H has three bedrooms, a sitting room, and a shared bath. And what we have found is in a community of respect where people really see each other's family members, it's okay to have people of different genders sharing bathrooms. We do have a non-fraternization rule. We've had a couple of people who have fallen in love and moved out and gotten married actually, but we do ask that people not be romantically involved with each other in the house because it disturbs the family dynamic.

A diverse community

There are many political views represented at Casa Milagro. We have every possible spiritual from let's say conservative Christian to Buddhist to atheist and everything in between. This year one of our Jewish residents chose to do a Passover Seder and include her whole community so that they could learn more about what that is, cause a Seder really is just about liberation. And so we celebrated everyone's liberation, not just the Jews leaving Egypt. People of different ages.

Right now, I think our youngest is in her twenties; the oldest is close to 70. Every possible identification that you can imagine. And within that what's so beautiful, it's harmonic every day. If people have a disagreement, they name it and they respectfully give their experience of what happened. And if they need help, there's always someone to witness and to help untangle if there's a communication gap. For the most part, everyone is so respectful because we all want to be treated that way. So that's our culture is kindness.

Where does the name Casa Milagro come from?

Even though I am not bilingual, I've taken so many classes trying to learn conversational Spanish because I do have a bias that anyone who lives in New Mexico should be bilingual. I've really tried. New Mexico was a predominantly Spanish-speaking state. You know, I'm a local immigrant, right? I came in as a stranger and so I think it's important to embrace the language and the culture that exists here.

How to avoid the stigma attached to previously homeless people?

That's a really good question. I really think that most of the people who show up have already done that work on themselves. Do you know what I mean? They already either have at the very least non-judgment and, at the very most, a deep curiosity. They have an interest in making good connections.

And I do have a bias. I believe that we all are on the spectrum somewhere and that our culture's pretty ill right now in terms of divisiveness. And so, you know, I think we were kind of needing each other more than ever right now has been my experience. So most of the people who come on, I don't think they'd have so much fear. Meryl Lieberman

A lot of people will come, let's say from the schools, the graduate programs because they had a mentally ill family member or they know they want to go into psychiatry perhaps or psychology working with severe mental illness. This is a really good training ground for them. And to be with people in their own home is so intimate, you know, it's very humane rather than sitting in an office and having the 50 minute hour.

And you know, we think that every moment at Casa is a potential therapeutic moment because we're holding somebody in light. Right. And that's the healing.

You have a very holistic approach to your residents.

Well, I had to get over some biases to be honest, because when I was in private practice in the Bay area, I really did not believe in any kind of psychotropic medication. I thought it was a tool of the pharmaceutical industry to keep us all down.

I still have biases, but for some people who have a severe brain chemistry malfunction, it's lifesaving and I've come to understand that. So it's been a really mind-opening experience for me to overcome.

Healing homeless people: the importance of companion animals

Most of the time, though for myself and for the community, I think eating well, being kind, keeping good thoughts, meditating and doing yoga and the animals is helpful. The animals are everything. Every resident is invited to bring a companion pet. One woman who lived there for a few years had a companion hedgehog and she used to carry it in a little scarf, it would be right by her heart all day long. Bear, my service dog, used to come to work with me every day and people have dogs and cats and aquaria. I don't think anybody has a snake right now, but they're talking about it. So yeah, that's important to have something to care for each person.

What is unique about Casa Milagro? A sense of equality

At the moment I'm with you and you're with me and we're in it together. There really isn't that separation of the helper and the helpee. I say this all the time when people come to visit Casa, and people come often.

The thing that makes me the proudest is there's nobody wearing a name tag saying I'm the doctor, I'm the social worker, I'm the counselor. Everybody's there together. We are all there together.

Somebody is mopping the floor. It might be a staff person, and it might be a resident. Do you know what I mean? There is no separation because everybody's role is so important.

How many homeless people have benefit from Casa Milagro?

A couple hundred probably. I mean, one resident came in 2000 and he will probably be with us until such time as he'd need skilled nursing care. This is his home. Others, it's so amazing, it can be one year, three years, five years, they get what they need to go and have a wonderful independent experience.

I want to talk about our first resident, who wound up teaching at a university, starting his own computer company, marrying and having a child. And here's my best news, weaning off of his psychotropic medication and treating himself with herbs and diet and this, he moved out maybe nine years ago and um, isn't that wonderful?

I mean, so all of the diagnostic stuff and the stigma that he carried, it's not his anymore. That, that was then.

Can you share another story of a resident?

One I missed very much died some years ago. She had been a nurse for years and years at UNM hospital. She had some serious bipolar episodes and she lost her job, her kids, by acting out in these ways. When she came to Casa Milagro, she could not make eye contact with anybody. She had not just no self-esteem but negative self-esteem. Everything about her was horrible to her by the time she lived there.

She lived there for about 15 years. She felt like the matriarch of the house. People would come to her for advice. She was able to call on her nursing experience to give people some medical and mainly herbs to take different things to do if you have arthritis or whatever. And she found her value and to me it was everything. And she died knowing that she was loved and that she was valued that was Helen Lane.

Where does your drive for helping homeless people come from?

I'm going, to be honest. I was acting out as a child. I had a grandma who was a Holocaust survivor who spent some time in mental hospitals. And when I used to act out, my mom would sometimes threaten to send me to one of those places. And so early on, I made a decision that that's my life's work is to keep people out of those places. I got working with homeless people when I lived in the Bay area.

I realized that homelessness and mental illness are pretty much one diagnosis.

It doesn't matter what occurred first. When I came here, I started a program called the mentally ill homeless services and that's how I got around the state gun, getting to see what resources we lacked.

Did it influence you in creating Casa Milagro?

The idea of Casa Milagro for sure, because if I'm going to create a home, it's got to be a home I'd want to live in. Right. It's got to have all of the things that I would want in a home. And most, especially people who are gonna make eye contact, eye contact with me every day with respect. I mean if, if they have that every day, that's everything because then they get the confidence to go out. Several of them right now are volunteering at other places in the community. One has a part-time job out in the community. I love to see that, you know, just to pay it forward in that way.

Do you think your Jewish background influence what you are doing today?

Yeah, I grew up very much with that sensibility. Unfortunately, quite a bit of fear that they're going to come for us. Be careful. And the man I married, his last name was Micknew. And I kept that name for a long time because it was easier to be a Micknew than a Lieberman in this culture. Right? I think the Holocaust is happening now. It's happening again and we have to witness, we have to bear witness and we have to acknowledge that we, only we can stop. We're the only ones who can stop it and because of the stigma attached, we blame the victim rather than look at the context.

We are lucky here in Santa Fe. There are a lot of activists in this town, a lot of people doing really important ground-level organizing. Not just throwing money at things, which is easy to do for some, and I appreciate them very much. But the day-to-day knocking on doors and changing gerrymandering. For example, in our area, making sure that elders in this town get to vote, get to register to vote. You know, especially now it's important.

How do you collaborate with other organizations to help homeless people?

One thing is we work with all of the local shelters for homeless people. We work with local mental health agencies. We are all a part of the New Mexico Coalition to end homelessness. So we stay up with what funds are available, where are the places right now. The coalition is paying a lot of attention to the rural communities that are very horribly underserved to start like young people, young women and children. We don't have children at Casa Milagro.

We work with the local government agencies, the city, the County. It just seems that we're working now on trying to go solar and we're working with a local group called positive energy that I believe is going to be very kind to us in partnering to make that happen. In Santa Fe, particularly, there is so little social service money. So many organizations are fighting for the same little pot of money that we have to work together. If we compete with each other, it'll destroy all of us.

How Meryl's work with homeless people has influenced others to follow her path?

HUD came. They sent people from DC. The man said they thought it should be a model for the country. It made me really happy because he was greeted at the door by dogs. Art was everywhere and it's a beautiful house. You know, it's out in the County. It's about eight and a half miles out. And yeah, it made me really happy. I said, you go for it, you just put them everywhere. And you know, we have a wonderful governor right now who is not only an ally around mental health but around education, around the environment. She's actually holding a summit to see how we can stay protected from the violence that's epidemic right now. And I'm hoping that she will be on board to allocate some state money for Casa Milagro to use our model across the state.

Even in Santa Fe. Right now, there is nothing our state mental hospital is in the process of being regulated, they've never been regulated and that needs to happen.

Why are homeless people in the street?

There is a street culture and we need to be respectful of that. There really are some homeless people who do not want to be in any kind of role anywhere with the government. And they really have adapted to living in the streets and getting their meals where they can.

We're very fortunate. There's a very strong interfaith community here. I mean the Muslims and the Christians and the Jews, everybody the Buddhists have all come together to try to make Santa Fe at least a sanctuary city and, and we're very welcoming in that way.

And so I think a lot of people come who don't have any resources because they know they're going to get a meal somewhere. They know they're going to be taken in at least temporarily, I think it's an easy place, even in the winter. It's an easy place to come.

Are you hopeful about the future of homeless people?

I'm hopeful that eventually more people are going to recognize that we're all part of the problem and all part of the solution.

Right now, there's the university of art and design down the road that has been sitting empty, I think, for close to a year. And there's some talk about the city selling it to some other corporation. They probably got to knock down all the buildings and put a shopping mall. Right now, it could house every homeless people in this town and it's sitting empty. So I have to fight with feeling powerless about that. You know, that there's still always the bureaucratic red tape and business as usual.

What can you suggest for those of us who have mental health issues or who have family members with mental health issues and do not know what to do?

Definitely contact their local chapter of the National Alliance for mental illness. There are always family groups. Family to family it's called. They do training locally. That's the very first place. And just to contact your local community mental health center and find out how they're addressing these issues rather than just writing prescriptions. Ask what are there groups available? Are there life skills being taught? What kind of psychosocial rehab was going on besides to teach independence skills, not just to Medicaid, and tie them to a chair?

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What would you say to someone considering opening a Casa Milagro?

Give everything you have. Keep your heart open. You're probably going to encounter some of the 'not in my backyard.' We're out in the County and some of our neighbors were pretty not excited that we were coming. We had a barbecue when we first opened. They realized after meeting our residents and actually seeing humanity, that these were just people. One of them invited one of our young women residents to a babysit for their kid. Another one hired one for a dog walking assignment. They really had a bias that we were somehow going to be violent in the neighborhood. And, once they saw who we were, we were so accepted. And I think it's just all a matter of bearing witness really.

Listen to the full interview with Meryl Lieberman below

In Need of Inspiration Be Part Of The Solution

To help you find some gems in the podcasting jungle, we’ve made a selection of podcasts to listen to help make sense of the complexity and interconnectivity of the world. Our favorite podcasts to listen to are produced and hosted by women. They focus on solutions on how to advance our society forward.

1. Go Simone

An undisguised tribute to two French female change-makers, Simone de Beauvoir and Simone Veil, Go Simone highlights the key role women play in dreaming a better future. Championing climate action and justice in Australia and worldwide, Go Simone is an invitation to speak up, act, and contribute to a greener world.

Episode 10: Cecile Gauthier

In episode 10 with Cecile Gauthier co-founder of the marketing consultancy and design 100% women-owned agency Lime, you can learn about upcycling internet waste. The side note is Lime has been instrumental in redesigning Be Your Change’s website and we were not aware of their connection to Go Simone. When you start reaching for the community you want, you’ll discover the world is much smaller than you think.

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2. Be Your Change podcast

Juliette Roy takes you on a journey across the globe to understand the solutions women are creating to impact the world. The show covers a wide range of topics, including zero waste, eco-fashion, impact investing, fair trade, or podcasting.

3. Innov8 Social: the podcast to listen to about social entrepreneurship

The host Neetal Parekh explores stories, trends, and potential in social innovation and social entrepreneurship. She interviewed founders, filmmakers, attorneys, students, CEOs, global social entrepreneurs, designers, inventors, investors, professors, and social intrapreneurs who are shifting the paradigms of business, technology, law, and media to pursue good as well as profit. Learn from their experience and advice. And, find meaningful ways to reach your social impact potential.

4. OneinFour podcast

Humanize. Educate. Elevate. Conversations on the re-entry process of people who have experienced incarceration. With Bea Spadicini and her cohost, you’ll learn what barriers people who have paid their debt to society face when they come out of prison and return to their communities. Moreover, learn how you can help to change the systemic oppression of minorities by the criminal justice system.

"The system of mass incarceration is based on the prison label, not prison time." Author and scholar Michelle Alexander

5. Hashtag Impact: podcasts to listen to stories that really matter

Audio enthusiasts on a mission to get people to listen to stories that really matter, Regina Larko, founder of Hashtag Impact cover topics like green living, social impact and podcasting.

6. The Stoop: stories from across the black diaspora

The Stoop podcast digs into stories that are not always shared out in the open. Leila Day and Hana Baba start conversations about what it means to be black and how we talk about blackness. It’s a celebration of black joy with a mission to dig deeper into stories that we don’t hear enough about. One of our favorite episodes is Je Suis Un Noir. Born in France, we like this episode because it put some light on what it means to Black in Paris, far from the traditional cliche.

7. Food Heroes Podcast

Yes, we know, there is a massive problem with the food industry. For too long, the focus has been on maximizing profits at any cost. We met K80, the host of Food Heroes at She Podcasts Conference, and we fell in love with her show. Food Heroes covers topics like fair trade food, sustainable farming, turning waste into edible upcycling, and so much more directly from K80’s Kitchen.

One of our favorite episodes is the one about all the things to know about banana

“That one extra dollar per box goes into a fund that they all collectively – either as workers or as small farmers – decide what to spend it on.”

8 World-Changing Women

What do some of the most purpose-driven companies in the world have in common? They were all founded by women. Well, Conscious company media behind the World-Changing Women podcast was also founded by a woman, Meghan French Dunbar and you can read her interview here. On the World-Changing Women Podcast, we’ll hear about the most inspiring women in business today to learn how they built their businesses that are thriving and changing the world

Do you want to recommend podcasts to listen to we should feature? contact us drop us a line

One of the most secrets of Parisian neighborhoods, Montreuil is well-known for its left-wing politics and its diverse immigrants' population. The city has been led by a succession of Mayors affiliated with the French communist but also the Green party.

1. The Move
2. The Explorer

One of the most diverse Parisian Neighborhoods: an Incredible Melting Pot right at the door of Paris.

Montreuil is one of the most diverse Parisian neighborhoods. The result is an incredible melting pot of culture, diverse languages, and a deep artistic community that goes back to the early century with the movie industry. Today, the town is home to more than one hundred thousand people. Known for its cultural diversity, its working-class and recently a more Parisian Boheme lifestyle, Montreuil hosts a tight community of artists and counts more than 800 artist workshops. You can listen to any genre of music and live music any night of the week. Restaurants serve food from all over the world.

Rebecca Dry, a creative British immigrant adventurer has been living in Montreuil for a long time. Her background in media and branding made her attracted to the interesting texture of Montreuil. The result is Love Montreuil, an online magazine showcasing the wonderful things that go on in the Paris suburb of Montreuil in France. Both locals and tourists can find the best places to eat, drink, see a show, or just read about some unique, creative people in the area.

“So it's almost like a hidden jewel and lots more people from Paris are coming to live here now, which is good. They wouldn't have touched it 10 years ago and now it's kind of trendy to live here, you know, so they call it the Brooklyn of Paris…and it tends to be where people maybe dare to be a bit different.

Just how Montreuil is a melting pot of identities, so is Rebecca Dry. Her day job is in communications, but she is a person full of passion. Rebecca loves to sing and tell stories and she combines those two loves to build Love Montreuil to what it is today.

A Tireless Explorer of Parisian Neighborhoods

Rebecca: I'm English. I’ve lived in Paris for 21 years. Half of my life. I'm someone who does a lot of different things, a lot of different activities. I launched the online magazine called Love Montreuil, which is obviously about my hometown, where I live now just outside of Paris, where I've been for now 17 years.

So what made you decide to move from Paris to one of the most unknown Parisian neighborhoods?

Rebecca: Paris was a kind of accident but it was kind of wished for as well. When I was a student in England, I came to France for my third year. I went down the kind of the beginning of the Southwest of France in a town called [inaudible]. And I was there for a year between the age of 19 and 20…20 and 21 absolutely adored it. I came back to England to finish my studies. And when I graduated after my fourth year of studies, I only wanted to come back to France. It was like an obsession.

I used to work for the French government as an English assistant. Two years after, that was over, I received a letter saying that they have a lack of English assistants in the system and asking me if I would like to do it again? And we have a job in Paris or a job within a village with 300 people in the mountains in the Pyrenees. And I was like. I like nature, but I think I might go to Paris. So this thing was like a godsend.

Rebecca’s Parisian’s Neighborhoods Life

Well after one year I've been in Paris. I absolutely adored it, loved it, then got a job in advertising. I started working and communication was what I wanted to do and then I've never been back. So it was kind of a coincidence. I wasn't even to stay a year or two and I've been here 21 years. Four years after living in one of the most bobo Parisian neighborhoods, the 11th district which is kind of a mixed area, very arty, very trendy, I wanted to invest in something. I could not afford an apartment in Paris, it was too expensive for me at the time.

Montreuil’s First experience

Rebecca: I was young, so I knew Montreuil, which was just outside of Paris. Very arty, very kind of cool. But very can people like, Montreuil is dangerous, you know, there's loads of, you know, it's kind of a scabby area. But I'd been going to funk parties there at night for years. I'd never seen it during the day, but I kind of was familiar with it. I thought I'll come to check out Montreuil. It's not too far from the East of Paris where I lived. And I found a flat there that was probably half the price and five metro stops away. So I thought I'll invest here. And I came to Montreuil.

It is an amazing place there's nowhere like it in France. There's nowhere like it here. 1,500 artists live here. There's something like eight to 900 artists workshops. There's tens of fab labs. There is a punk and rock music culture but also a gypsy culture.

Montreuil’s Commitment To Nature: The ‘Mur de Pêches’

Culture in Montreuil is everywhere and along with culture, there is the environment with many public vegetable gardens and the famous ‘Mur de pêche’, which means the wall of peach.

Rebecca: There is a kind of cultural heritage in Montreuil. The Mur de Pêche is the peach wall. There are acres and acres of peaches. It used to be grown for the Royal family. They are now being restored. The walls are covered with peaches. It is now an artistic area where there are a festival and three beautiful parks. And there's just this feeling of creativity everywhere you go and feeling of an alternative lifestyle as well.

People from Montreuil are different. They are rebellious.

One of The Most Diverse, Artistic and Rich Parisian’s neighborhoods

Rebecca: The press has called Montreuil, the Brooklyn of Paris. It tends to be where people maybe dare to be a bit different. Creating new projects, places as well, which are really cool and trendy and alternative. And the cultural offer is amazing: dance, theater, and music. There is a huge amount of music studios here at least 12 different recording studios, quite well-known ones.

It's buzzing and a great vibe everywhere you go. You can feel it in the streets. It's colorful. There is a lot of street art and artists are respected in Montreuil. Artists get helped with housing and funding for the art as well.

Secret Parisian Neighborhoods: The Inspiration Behind Love Montreuil

Rebecca: I've been living here for 17 years. I was very Parisian when I first came here. It wasn't the same offer here either, so I used to go to Paris all the time and the last few years I've been noticing, I've literally been staying in Montreuil. Not hardly going into Paris apart from work. There are some beautiful exhibitions or you know, still amazing things you can find in Paris. But the offer was getting better and better in Montreuil. It used to be a couple of places to go out on at night, but now there's lots of choice, amazing DJs, amazing live acts, brilliant exhibitions, festivals, et cetera.

I thought to myself, there isn't a website about this town that I myself would love to read and fall upon. You know, I would love to know about what's going on in this town. So there was nothing. I thought, why don't I create one? So I decided to do it and I decided to create it myself from scratch, like the website, everything, the photos, everything, the content, with a view to valorizing and valorizing my town and also the people who make it move and shake.

It’s All About Storytelling

Rebecca: I created different sections I'm passionate about think are important. A guide with information about where can you eat, drink, where to go out, where to see an exhibition. The main section is the story section. It's four to six new people stories every month. It can be about a founder of a jazz festival or the owner of a new restaurant. It can be the portrait of a sculptor or street artist. There are all sorts of different stories.

Love Montreuil is a cultural snapshot of what's going on here. It's not a guide to go out. There's already a guide that exists in Montreuil.

Juliette: That's a very interesting combining all of these different almost asset of the city. I don't like that word when you talk about culture and art, but kind of the richness and mixed city. I think that mixing art and with anything is very powerful,

Rebecca: Extremely powerful, it elevates it to another level. With my normal job, I organize events and do communication strategy and, and loss for the things we do with communication. But I worked for two years was in an agency in Paris and we used art to communicate with for brands.

And, you know, as soon as art's involved in anything, the opportunities are endless. It becomes more fun. It becomes creative. It's just such a great platform for anything.

A Collaborative Approach

Juliette: I like the approach you're having, which is kind of making sure you link all these different labels of the society and then really trying to make them collaborate together.

Rebecca: Exactly. Because obviously in Montreuil, there's a lot of trendy places and people think it's getting too gentrified and et cetera.

But on my website, I showcase all the old shops as well, the traditional shops. The kind of places which are not chic. I'm interviewing some of the guys who live in the African home here. There are lots of African workers' homes and maybe a photography project with the girl I've met with them as well.

The Paradox of Diversity and Gentrification Of This Secret Parisian Neighborhoods

Rebecca: Montreuil is kind of a paradox. Some very wealthy people live there even though it's still very considered as a kind of working-class area. It's obviously the fact that it was cheaper. It attracted a lot of wealth and people invested here. But I don't want my website just to be some of the kind of snobby reading destination. Montreuil ‘s cultural mix like you said is fantastic. I want my website to reflect that as well. When I interview people, the same thing comes back for every single person is the cultural mix city here, the cultural mix. Everyone's said it.

Everyone is like, that's why I love Montreuil. I want to go to a shop run by these Iraquis guys and have all these products from the Middle East. All these amazing things you’ve never seen before. I want to have an African traditional meal. Turn the corner and go to a Vietnamese restaurant. Walk further up and go to the Indian store. Shop at the Portuguese supermarket, and check out I these amazing Italian restaurants. This is what Montreuil is about.

If we loose diversity, that wouldn't be Montreuil anymore.

Meet Rebecca, The Singer

When Rebecca moved to this secret Parisian neighborhood, it made sense. She is an artist herself. And the reason that today I think you're doing a media site, which is kind of, promoting art and in mixed city and stories refers to the last 17 years where you've been mixing your communication background and music and publishing your first album and second album. So where does this love of art and music come from?

Two albums of original music

Rebecca: It's strange when I think about it. I tried to answer this question myself a lot because I'm a singer. I've released two albums of original music in France. I had a lot of radio play as well on national stations and which is still absolutely unbelievable to me. But I had a very classic and lovely childhood. My family expected me to go to university and get a job. We lived in the North of England and it's a small town. So it wasn't a big city with lots of opportunities like London. And the art world was so far away from my reality when I was young. Being an artist, a dancer, a singer was like, that's for the other people.

I had musical abilities as well. I used to play the violin. The piano in orchestras for about 10 years and sing in the choir. But I was good at it, I won a few talent shows, but it was never like, I'm going to be an artist now. Looking back, I sometimes wish I had tried to make it as an artist, as a singer because I knew I was a good singer. I was nine, 10 kind of thing, but it wasn't for us. It wasn't our type of family. So I always did it as a hobby on the side.

It was normal for me to love music but to be an artist myself was something else. And it's something I developed later on in life when I was maybe 35 or above, which is quite late really.

Do You Have Regrets about not becoming a professional singer earlier in life?

Rebecca: I didn't really believe in myself and I wish I had when I was younger. People who make it, they push themselves forward. I don't like putting myself forward.

Rebecca: And I never, still to this day, don't see myself as an artist even though I am. And I write songs and I can sing and I've got people telling me I have a great voice and a professional level and everything. I don't know, it's just, um, under the side to me, once again, it's on the side and it's never been the main job. And

I think in life things are just circumstance of where you're from, where you are born into.

I've always been torn between two things. Being academic and then being artistic. When I was young I was, I just wanted to have my degree, doing a normal job, have security. Not at all Bohemian, not at all artistic at all.

A traditional childhood

Rebecca: My family was always like, you know, making sure you have some stability in life and then the artistic thing is on top. You're not going to be an artist. For me, artists were equaled poor, being in a hovel somewhere and never getting any work, you know, like being a singer, like as a career that is just so, that was so scary to me. You know, it would never even cross my mind anyway. But yeah, doing it as a hobby and keeping it always on the side is something we should kind of **confusing** the need in you to be creative kind of relieves you of this thing.

But there's always that frustration of, and what if I had have become professional and I think I would have loved to have been professional singer because when you sing you are in a complete bubble.

It is just an amazing feeling. There's nothing like it. It's just euphoric and thanks to music as well and all the people I've met through music, it's helped me with my creativity and my writing as well.

Does your art sensibility has influenced your journalist’s work?

Thanks to my singing, it all binds together because the singing got me another job in journalism, which hones your talent for meeting people, empathizing, finding the right words, getting them to express themselves in an interview, which then helps you again for what I’m doing now. So all these worlds combined, I think it’s quite logical. If you’re interested in art and culture in yourself, then you can be creative in different domains. So to me, it kind of all links back.

Well, that's a very rich, busy life as you see is super active women. Never satisfied with yourself…

The need to give back

Rebecca: I just think what do I contribute to society? It always just gets me. Am I going to leave a trace? What have I done when I've left this earth to leave a trace? I'm always wondering. And this website is about doing some positive for the community I live in. Working in communication and marketing, you sell things, you organize events, it means nothing in life.

I'm trying to give some sense to life as well, through creativity, through my music, through this project, through other things. I always have this constant thing of like, what are you actually doing for this world? I feel it's still not enough.

How Did You Choose What You Like The Most?

I've always been torn between lots of different things in life. Should I be in a singer? Should I've stayed in England? Should I have to come to France?

And I think it's good to be creative, but I also think it's, it creates a lot of frustration in people who are always kind of wanting to do more projects.

Juliette: It sounds like you're on a beautiful journey.

Rebecca: I am on a journey definitely.

And the most important thing for me is people. I like people, I like meeting people. I'm nosy. That's why I'm a good journalist. Probably. I like getting stories, meeting people, getting to know people. I think it's just so interesting. I'm constantly curious about people and I think it's so amazing what we're surrounded by people who can help each other. People can inspire each other, you know? And I think if we don't get to know people enough, we can stay with a small circle of friends, but there's so much more out there, so many amazing people who are doing amazing things.

Montreuil, One of The Most Vibrant Parisian Neighborhoods.

Talking about Montreuil is like talking about the incredible diversity of France often invisible in the mainstream media, in politics or in corporate France. For me, that’s what I love France, not the pretty postcard but more this incredibly complicated mix of cultures and history. Close to 9% of Muslims live in France, but the country still does not offer the option to learn Arabic in school. My hope is that Rebecca’s work can shine a new light on French culture far from the usual postcard.

So, if you get to Paris, get in the metro and go on a journey of Montreuil.