MinDoor: Opening the Door to Limitless Possibilities through Education and Employment Partnership

MinDoor, a new Non-Governmental Organization, was founded in Georgia to care for the development of young people, promote women involved in business, and to strengthen companies and organizations in the regions. Diplomat Magazine spoke to Lana Chkhartishvili, the Founder and CEO of MinDoor and Nino Beruashvili, Founder and Managing partner of MinDoor, about MinDoor’s strides in Georgia.

Where did the idea of founding MinDoor come from?

Lana Chkhartishvili, founder and CEO of MinDoor:

MinDoor is an independent, Non-Governmental Organization whose primary mission is making quality education more accessible to various social groups and to promote the employment of people in these social groups through public-private partnerships.

We strongly believe in the transformative power of education. When I was still in school, I had the opportunity to study in the US through the FLEX exchange program, and I consider this experience to have played a key, transformative role in my life. All I have wanted since then is to help as many people as possible so that they too can have the opportunity to get more information that would improve their productivity. It is precisely this desire that brought me and Nino together, and I am glad that our partnership is taking place again in such an important work.

Your organization has a very interesting name. Why MinDoor?

Nino Beruashvili, founder and managing partner of MinDoor:

We have tried our best to name our organization to reflect our mission. Our mission is to discover and promote innovative ideas that inspire, empower and impact society. We thought about what we need to discover to allow us spread such ideas, and we realized that this is the door of our mind - Mind Door, the opening of which helps us to expand our possibilities. And when we put this name on paper, we realized that it reads like a field - a place that also metaphorically denotes limitless possibilities. That’s why we removed one D from our name and that’s how MinDoor was born - a place of opportunities where we are happy to meet you.

It sounds interesting. What are the specific directions for your organization’s work?

Lana Chkhartishvili: Our strategic development plan includes three main goals. We call these goals three doors based on our name, and we have dedicated our corporate colors to all three doors: Green, Yellow and Azure. The Green Door’s goal is to support youth development through education, mentoring and internship programs; The Yellow door refers to the promotion of women in the development of business activities, while the Turquoise door refers to the promotion of institutional strengthening for companies and Non-Governmental Organizations in the region. We believe that every door has many keys and we want to support the community to discover as many keys as possible. Each of our doors or goals has tasks or keys, where we have detailed how we intend to open each door to the public.

To summarize, we are focused on three of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): quality education, employment promotion and public-private partnership. We deeply believe that by achieving these goals, it is possible to create a society where knowledge and resources are available to all members without limitations, and they will be able to use these resources to improve their future, thus increasing the productivity and well-being of our society.

Finally, what is the structure of the team that you have put in place to aim for the achievement of these ambitious goals?

Nino Beruashvili: My experience and Lana’s experience is quite broad and it covers activities in various managerial positions in both the public and private sectors. We got to know each other at the beginning of our careers, and since then our mutual cooperation paths have crossed many times. Our experience gives us the ambition to take on such an important task. It should be noted here that our team also consists of honorary members of the organization, who have expert experience, and more importantly, share in the mission of our organization and are involved in the process of project management and implementation. We also have an advisory board whose purpose is to scrutinize our strategic goals and provide invaluable advice which we implement as recommendations. Now, we are actively working on the final recruitment of our advisory board and will soon announce their names to the public.