Global Vision, Local Outlook

Alumni from down the road and the other side of the world are finding power in rethinking the familiar and using the things that connect us to propose new visions for the future.

A HOME AWAY FROM HOME

Reem Al-Awadhi studied the MA Social Entrepreneurship at Goldsmiths, graduating in 2017. The following year, Reem founded Yalla Hub – a network of immigrants and people from marginalised communities that support and uplift each other. Reem is Co-Director of the Hub and Co-Manager of Communitea Café, where members of the Hub share their time and experiences.

“Growing up in an immigrant family, my everyday life was a practice of connecting the local with the global. A Yemeni family living in a small industrial town in China in the early 2000s was a path rarely trodden – many of our experiences were firsts and we had to discover how to navigate the hyperlocal without a support system. Learning the language, getting to grips with neighbourhood markets and systems of transportation… it was all experienced as ‘outside insiders’ – neither here nor there, always longing to connect both worlds of this home and back home harmoniously.

While I was a student at Goldsmiths, my experiences as an immigrant shaped my areas of interest. When I started exploring research topics, I asked myself: where are the spaces that make you feel seen and heard? Where are the spaces that understand the paradox of longing to feel rooted but without having to uproot parts of yourself? Where can someone ask for advice and support in a casual, friendly setting? This is where the idea for Yalla Hub was born. I began looking into how to establish a home away from home. A space where people could connect over the unspoken understanding of the paradoxical situations that immigrants find themselves in (expectations versus reality, belonging versus isolation etc), and create experiences and stories – however temporary – where that boundary between local and global ceases to exist. To bring Yalla Hub to life, we needed a location that people could easily access and want to return to. So came Communitea, a small café in South Norwood that would become the home of Yalla Hub.

Through my Masters I had developed the tools and methods for responding to social problems in a sustainable, impactful way. It was time to research ideas of ‘community’ and what that entails through case studies. I visited and spoke to people at community cafés, farms, and local education platforms, to explore how they came to be ‘community-oriented’. I learned how to structure a social enterprise to balance financial sustainability with meeting social goals. After completing my MA, I took part in the Graduate Entrepreneur scheme at Goldsmiths, where I received mentorship and support while establishing Yalla Hub and Communitea Café and running them for the first two years.

Through the café, we have developed profound relationships with the local community and grown Yalla Hub’s network of mutual support. Communitea has become the hyperlocal and Yalla Hub is the global, and the line between where one starts and the other ends is unknown, with both feeding into each other interdependently. People get to connect through events, gatherings, informal one-to-one advice and workshops, and most importantly through the chance to eat, drink, listen to music, and share their troubles and joys together.

Through mutual trust and understanding individuals have felt safe enough to seek informal support with the struggles they are facing – whether that relates to immigration status, housing advice, job-seeking guidance, or personal problems. This support system has been strengthened by the formation of the Croydon Refugee & New Communities Forum (CRNCF), which is a collective of activists, organisations and charities in the borough working to make it a more welcoming place for migrants. Being part of the forum, we’ve been able to relay the local challenges we witness to other organisations and charities in Croydon, and understand the wider needs of migrants and asylum seekers in the area.

Yalla Hub’s focus for the future will be on the relationship between the locality of South Norwood and the context of being a 10-minute drive away from the Home Office. To many migrants and asylum seekers, South Norwood and Croydon are some of the first places they interact with in the UK. As such, through our work at Communitea Café and with the wider network of CRNCF, we hope to strengthen solidarity and coordination of support. In doing so we hope to continue having a positive impact on the experiences of migrants and marginalised members of the community.”

yallahub.co.uk

communitea.co.uk

HOPEFUL STORYTELLING FOR GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT

Sarah Page (BSc Psychology, 2013) has been working within international development and human rights non-governmental organisations (NGOs) for more than seven years, advising on strategy, storytelling and digital media. Sarah is a published freelance journalist, has a background in documentary filmmaking, and has spoken in numerous public forums about decolonising global development communications.

Sarah interviewing Delkwaz, a young Kurdish entrepreneur from Erbil, Kurdistan Region of Iraq

Photo © SPARK

“I don’t think anyone goes to Goldsmiths expecting a typical university experience. Growing up in Cornwall, I wasn’t exactly exposed to that many people who were physically, culturally, politically or any other ‘-ally’ different to me. My psychology degree taught me to look at human behaviour and understand the motives for why people do the things they do. I think this helped me to listen, properly, to the people I now work with. I’m able to communicate with individuals from all walks of life and collaborate on hopeful narratives that can do some good.

When I was fresh out of Goldsmiths, I worked with a Peckham-based documentary filmmaker, Mark Saunders, founder of Spectacle Media. He set me on my path towards a career in communications. We made a film together, ‘Bleacher in the Rye’, which documents a fractious moment in Peckham’s tilt towards gentrification and redevelopment. Local residents and business owners took on British railway giant, Network Rail, in a fight about £5million funding that was promised to the area after the 2011 riots. Telling nuanced stories is important in an age where we only read the headlines. (You can watch the film for the reasonable sum of 99p on Vimeo and you’ll be supporting an independent, hyperlocal filmmaker in the process.)

After that I worked in communications roles at Human Rights Watch UK and Amnesty International, before joining SPARK – a Dutch-founded international non-governmental organisation. SPARK focuses on job creation for young people in fragile and conflict-affected regions like Syria, South Sudan and Afghanistan, so that they can rebuild their own communities with education, skills, entrepreneurial ideas and economic stability. SPARK also acts as a broker and capacity builder, supporting smaller organisations to grow and access global development funding themselves.

As the Communications Manager of a team of incredibly talented professionals – all of whom are from the countries and communities where we work (and one of which, by chance, is a Goldsmiths graduate as well) – we make a conscious choice to challenge negative stereotypes by using hopebased communication methods (a tool developed by Thomas Coombes, Amnesty International’s former Head of Brand and Deputy Communications Director). We work with participants of SPARK’s programmes to highlight positivity and hope: hope that you can be a woman beekeeper in Yemen; that you can be a Syrian refugee in Lebanon and also a kickass web developer; that you can be an Iraqi IDP (internationally displaced person) and work remotely for a global company. Hope is a powerful tool.

We choose to work with local creatives, photographers and filmmakers, who speak the same language and are often from the communities they document. We also provide as much content as possible in the languages of the regions we work in. Last year, our team was nominated for an award by Expertise Centre Humanitarian Communication for our film about a young Burundian entrepreneur, which was produced in Kirundi (the local language) and directed by Burundian filmmakers.

One of my Goldsmiths classes has stuck with me for all these years – ‘Evolutionary Psychology’, which looked at the behaviour of humans today through the lens of our biological evolution. Now, when I train people in storytelling principles, I go all the way back to the evolution of language and culture. Storytelling is innate and it shapes everything we do.

Looking back at my time at Goldsmiths, my main takeaway has been the people. The friends I made there I still call my best friends to this day, despite living across several continents now. I met artists who taught me to sew reams of fabric together, anthropologists who rolled their eyes at my high heels, digital media students from the South Pacific who taught me how to hula. I was challenged at Goldsmiths, over lots of cups of tea.”

sarahlpage.com

TACKLING THE BROKEN FOOD SYSTEM

Nantaporn Thirapongphaiboon graduated from Goldsmiths in 2018 with a Masters in Social Entrepreneurship. She is an Outreach Manager at Scholars of Sustenance Foundation, Thailand’s first food rescue organisation. She is also taking on bigger roles including as a member of the United Nations in Thailand’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Youth Panel.

Scholars of Sustenance Foundation distributes surplus food to vulnerable communities across Thailand

Photo © MGR Online

“I have always been interested in food and nutrition, especially how food has an impact on our health, minds and bodies. In my first job after graduating from my business degree in marketing I worked with a future protein start-up in Bangkok, and I learned about how unsustainable current food production is. I soon became curious about how to measure the social and environmental impacts of the business, and smartly communicate them with the intention of securing more support for upscaling. So I decided to pursue a Masters degree at Goldsmiths to gain more knowledge in the hope that one day I could become a ‘local food system changemaker’ back in my home country, Thailand.

The MA was challenging, but I really enjoyed every class, assignment and moment I had with my classmates from different countries, who shared their change-making experiences of their own local communities. The key thing I learned was the importance of collaboration among different actors in the economic model (civil society, private sector, government), because no one can ever work alone to achieve systemic changes.

I learned a lot about our broken food system in the capitalist world. We waste so much good food, and yet there are still a lot of people who cannot access that food.

After I graduated from Goldsmiths, I spent a gap year in the Netherlands learning more about circular food systems and sustainability communications at various organisations. When Covid-19 hit I decided to come back to Thailand and start my new journey, making changes at a local level. Since then I’ve been working as Outreach Manager at the Scholars of Sustenance Foundation, which aims to improve food equity by saving surplus food from more than 700 local and international partners and distributing it to vulnerable communities across 34 provinces in the country. I lead on fundraising, marketing communications, partnerships and impact data analytics. Having learned at Goldsmiths that big-picture changes need to be made by collaborating with government and private companies, I’ve been very proactive in knocking on doors and inviting different sectors to work together.

I’ve become an advocate for food sustainability and had the chance to speak about food waste and hunger issues at TEDxBangkok. I was also honoured to be invited by the United Nations in Thailand to become a member of the SDGs Youth Panel to promote food rescue work and inspire other young people around the world to be change agents for a sustainable and resilient future. We hope to establish a national food bank in the near future, to support people in need. In doing all of this work towards zero food waste and zero hunger I am confident we can build a future where we leave no one behind.”○

scholarsofsustenance.org/sos-thailand