Education Generation interview

Mila Lukic and Eileen Knowles receiving their award during the Youth Award Gala

I had the greatest pleasure to discuss with Miss Eileen Knowles about the Youth Award winning project Education Generation. She is the executive director of the project, and like the rest of her team, very dedicated to make the world a better place for everyone. Here's her interview:

Who are the core members of Education Generation? 

Eileen Knowles, Executive Director
Mila Lukic, Partnerships Manager
Shawn Smith, Director of Operations
Christina Wu, Community Director


For those who don't know, could you tell why you started this project?

-One: We saw an inefficiency in the traditional child sponsorship model, with high overhead costs and high costs for donors.

-Two: Traditionally the education for development sector has focused on need rather than potential and opportunity. We wanted to move away from pity-driven charity and give the donors the opportunity to understand more complete stories about the students they support.

-Three: We saw an opportunity to focus not only on access but on quality education. The big question was (and still is): "How can we train the next generation of leaders to address the world's big issues?"

-Four: We were interested in filling the gap of funding for secondary and tertiary education, since the governments and NGOs (non-governmental organizations) focus mainly on primary education. 

-Five: Many members of our team come from the "developing world" and were ourselves scholarship recipients; We'd like to extend the opportunities that were given to us to others.

How has the international community reacted to your project? 

There's been tremendous support for the work we do. Our goal now is to extend our reach and are excited to be featured in this blog to receive further attention and feedback!

What has been the best moment for you?  

I get joy from interaction with our students, when it becomes obvious that the work we do is worthwhile. Whether it is receiving an update from a scholarship recipient, meeting future scholars while traveling to Ecuador or reading updates from students... There are many instants through the year that we can consider the 'best'! 

Do you also support some of the students yourself (by donating to their scholarships)?  

Yes! All our team members are donors.


Where do you see yourselves going in the future?

We'd like to get more involved in discussions about innovative education. We are also preparing to launch new features on our website such as:

• Ability for individuals to launch their own scholarships in support of a particular student. For example, you might want to start a scholarship in the name of your family, town or school; We want to take the traditional scholarship approach (where institutions, families or endowments donate to students) to everyone. 

• We are creating a platform for our partner organizations to share best practices to add value to their work. 

• We are looking to launch and donate larger scholarships as our website traffic increases.

Something else you would like to say to the readers?

Please visit our website and consider donating as little as $20 to our students. Also, please share our work with your friends! Visit our sharing tool on our site to invite others to donate: http://educationgeneration.org/get-involved/ . 

We'd also love to hear from you, e-mail us at eileen@educationgeneration.org .

Thank you for your time, Eileen, and best of luck with your project in the future!

Education Generation facts:

More than 250 scholarships funded to date.

$100,000+ in early funding raised from corporate and private donors.

A constantly growing network of partners, already in Afghanistan, Ecuador, Ghana, Kenya, India, Pakistan, Peru , Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Uganda.

Over 600 active online community members

3,000 + online following

Interview with Mashallah News

"We wanted to just collect blogs, it was nothing ambitions and we wanted to write something we saw and couldn’t write in anywhere else" . This was how Isabelle Mayonnaise and Micheline Tobia, two out of three founders of Mashallah News, described the early days of their web journalist platform. Now this platform covers all major cities in Middle-East from Istanbul to Morocco. The birth of Mashallah News took place in Beirut Lebanon where three active citizen were fed up about typical news coverage of Arabic world. Wars, royalties and politics were only thing discuss in different medias and point of views were usually very polarized. "You couldn't have middle view or something describing what was happening". News lack the topics about underground cultural and citizen activism.

Mashallah News brings daily life of local people and street culture in to the wider audience. This kind of news coverage has been quite rare and in marginal for long time. Because of this, there is a tendency of thinking these cultures are all one homogeneous mass. "If people would read more they would get a wider image and would change but if you’re not exposed to this kind of news its completely normal to stay ignorant. That's why there is Mashallah News. You can just imagine how crazy daily life in the underground scenes of Iran for example is, but you never had the tools to inform your self about it". Isabelle and Micheline underline that the articles they pick for publishing have to contain fresh and alternative point of view. "You cant just write something because its poverty, not just about the emotion. And we don’t wanna do just good news, but the news that are uncovered. We don’t choose the topic because it's popular, we choose the topic if its interesting for us". For example issue of over population and expansion of City of Istanbul is dealt by writing about artists that uncover this in their work. When discussing about challenges, Michelle and Isabelle say that the biggest problem is writers self-censorship. Some times writers are afraid to write with their own name or they are afraid to be too provocative. Some issues like women rights and gay issues are still taboos in these countries. But there is always a way to avoid this. "They rather describe something that happened rather than write something that angers someone, but you can get the message through anyways". According to Micheline and Isabelle, spring 2011 (Arabian spring) didn't change the situation that much. "We started before Arabic spring and we found interesting people, the blogs were already there. Now people are maybe more open to talk about those subjects, about taboos people are maybe more open. Before this spring there were this energy ecisting for sure! These things, they were present, they were definitely present"

When launching Mashallah News, three of the founders had already quite wide network through out big cities in Middle-East. For recruiting more writers, they search through existing blogs and sent over 700 traditional emails with hardly any replies. "We wanted to have professional content in the sense that we ready every piece two or tree times by different people with different background and different language skills". They also contacted lot of University departures but with lack of luck. After a while, when Mashallah News had existed for some time, they started to get contacts from interested people. "More and more people are writing our inbox that we wanna participate. Like someone who’s from Italy and knows about Libya, lot of people from different backgrounds and it is inspiring. When we went to see them, they had reach out for they network and finally we ended up meeting 20 people that wanted to participate by donating money, spreading the news or even writing articles". Now they cover 20 major cities all around Arabic world and have over 50 journalist, artists or bloggers creating content for the site and publish 4 to 5 articles or stories in a week. They co-operate with different activist organizations such as feminist movements, citizen journalist and they have gained lot of new contacts in Middle-East and Europe. Co-operation is essential part of their work since Mashallah News itself is coalition of bloggers and journalist from different backgrounds. "Its good to co-operate and to be open for any kind of help and experiences, its only helpful". In the future, Mashallah News will focus on developing itself to be more like multimedia platform. They also think, that dealing with one major subject for a period of time will make the content more whole. "Idea was to start work on a projects or a scenes, because we started to do theme weeks and there were lot of interest for them that more than for isolated pieces, for both writers and readers". Articles, videos, sound reports and visual contents will all cover one subject all around the major cities Middle-East.

Taking part in WSYA, Micheline and Isabelle gained lot of new contacts from the area they are working at. They were also able to share and reflect their ideas with other people working for similar projects. By being a winner in the category “Create Your Culture” gives recognition for their work and credibility.

Mathias Haas - Exclusive interview

Mathias being interviewed during the WSYA

• Who are you? 

Mathias Haas, 24 years old, from Austria, CEO SuperSocial, WSYA Ambassador, Red Bull Student Brand Manager and a Law student at University of Vienna

• What was your role in this year’s World Summit Youth Award and how did you end up there?

I am WSYA Ambassador promoting the MDGs (Millennium Development Goals) in Austria and with SuperSocial I am a Social Media Partner of the WSYA. In 2007/2008 my partner Stephan Hamberger and I won the Netdays Award from Salzburg Research & the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture with the Project “Facebook Application Intercultural”, an app for Intercultural Dialog on Facebook. In 2009 we were nominated for the World Summit Youth Award in Mexico and we were honored as winners and one of the best e-Content Projects in the category “Create your Culture”. 

• What is SuperSocial Marketing? 

SuperSocial is a new media agency developing marketing solutions. We help brands to listen, understand and engage in conversations in social media. We are a new kind of agency, but conversations between people are nothing new. We strategize! We design! We talk! We motivate! We make sure that brands are pushing their social media strategy to its full potential. These days social media is a essential element of social conversation. If you want to know more about how to use social media to build your brand, then let’s talk!

Smart. Creative. Professional. Innovative. Super. Social. SuperSocial Marketing.

• Where did you get the idea? Who else is involved?

The idea was born because many companies were in need of Social Media Consultants and I was asked by friends to help them, and their friends asked me too, and so on… I decided to find my individual business and so I did. Working with me I have three programmers from the University of Applied Sciences Hagenberg, and two team members from the University of Vienna and local Partners all over the world.

• As a former winner of the Youth Award, do you have any tips for those young people who might consider taking part in the next Youth Award competition? 

Believe in your project. Use all possible social media tools. Find partners and network partners. Try to get other people involved. Make it international (languages!). Declare your targets and combine them with the MDGs. Be extraordinary and jump across borders.

• Any other words of wisdom you’d like to share? 

Stop waiting for others changing something in the world. Use your voice, user your energy and use your network, get on your feet and start being the change you want to see! Don’t give up and believe in yourself. With a collective effort let’s change the world into a better one. Stay awesome… Stay SUPER…


Thanks Mathias for the great interview! 


Be sure your check out the SuperSocial Marketing webpage!

Interview with Carina Schmid from The Global Experience

During the Friday afternoon at the University of Graz, Carina Schmid, the project manager of The Global Experience, agreed to sit down with Emma and I for a while and discuss about the organization and her role in it!

Schmid explained to us that the story and motivation behind The Global Experience started when she traveled to Africa 8 years ago and realized how different it actually is to visit other countries and cultures herself than just watch documents on TV. It really puts things in another perspective. Without traveling yourself you will have no clue what the life outside Europe is really like. Also she realized that helping the poor can be a lot more than just donating, and so the idea of The Global Experience sprouted. The aim is to give people the chance to meet and discuss with people from other cultures around the world and give the most motivated ones the chance to actually travel to the other side of the world to live and learn about other countries!

Being the project manager of The Global Experience, Schmid told that it gives a part-time payment but is a full-time job. Her tasks include applying for funding, evaluating projects and handling all the communication inside and outside of the organization. On top of that she also studies at the same time!

When we asked about the forums of The Global Experience which give the chance for people around the world to interact and exchange information with each other, she said that it has been working quite well. Of course it does not give the same impact as the real world events, but it helps people to learn more about each others cultures. YouTube language videos made by the organization brought more interested users to the forum. As in every forum, there are also some scammers, but a good reporting system helps to get rid of them quickly. Schmid describes the atmosphere of the forums to be very personal and friendly. Even though some arguments may arise, they are usually handled quite well.

The Global Experience also organizes meetings and events that take place around the world. Schmid says that the best thing in such events is to meet new and old people, exchange information and network. Seeing a crowd of people in the same place just because you had the idea to organize the event feels amazing, Schmid explains.

When we asked about the funding, Schmid told that there are no general sponsors or advertisers at the moment, but that they are constantly sending out new applications to gain more funding. People working in the organization are mostly volunteers.

In the end of the interview, we asked from Schmid is she had something to say to our fellow IMPs, and she did! "Join the community! We need Finnish users to tell us more about the Finnish culture and change the assumptions that everyone has about Finland!"

Thank you Carina Schmid, and congratulations!

Interview with Heba Habib – HarassMap

From 10^th to the 12^th of November we attended the World Summit Youth Awards (WSYA) in Graz, Austria. We witnessed many amazing people who presented their projects that in some way aimed to fulfill the millennium development goals. While we had the opportunity to enjoy all the projects, we decided to concentrate on HarassMap – a project that has its roots in Egypt.

During the Gala on the 12^th, we had the honor of interviewing Heba Habib – the spokesperson of HarassMap at WSYA. Our first impression of Miss Habib was that she was an energetic and fun-loving, young woman with a big heart.

We began our interview by asking her what the purpose of HarassMap was, and she eagerly answered that the main purpose was to discourage harassment of women, and to showcase that it really is a big problem. However; now they’re taking their initiative to slightly different direction. HarassMap will soon be getting a new outlook and a broader target group – not to mention a new name. “Catch Harassers” (their new name) will not only focus on the harassment of women, but also of men, disabled, children and the elderly. Miss Habib clear on the fact that they wanted to implement the male population in their project – as harassment is not only something that affects women. Furthermore, when the project was only geared towards women, the male reaction wasn’t very positive, as some men mocked it by saying for example “Oh, so this is where I can go to harass women! Nice!” …Which, of course, was not the desired purpose of the mission.

We were also interested in finding out more about Miss Habib’s role in HarassMap. She is not the creator of the project, but decided to become a volunteer after she heard about her friend being involved in this important and vital venture. One of her tasks in HarassMap is to get the video part of the website up and running – in addition to work with, and recruit, new volunteers. The topic of volunteering, however, brought up some of their most challenging obstacles. As HarassMap is solely comprised of volunteers, all the members have their own lives, full time jobs, families and studies to attend to – which often makes it hard to find people who have the time to stay fully committed. For example, Miss Habib told us that recently one of the volunteers she was closely working with, suddenly dropped out, even though she had seemed very excited and committed at the start – which sadly often proves to be the case.

“We should be able to walk down the street, and visit our local food store without being afraid of getting harassed. This is one of the most important things for us involved in this project.”

Personally we found Miss Habib to be a very open and warm person who is easy to talk to. We were happy to find out that they were moving HarassMap away from only women, to rather focus on a broader target group, because you will not achieve gender equality by focusing on separating women from the mass, and presenting them as weak and vulnerable.

Great initiative solely based on donations and volunteer work. We are impressed!

-AK & Maria

Zabatak - Caught you!

Zabatak - Caught you!

Mostafa Raafat from Zabatak, the anti-crime initiave, gave us a few moments for an interview in the coffeebreak on Saturday’s workshop. Zabatak was started in February 2011, just few days after the Egyptian revolution. The background for Zabatak lies in the corrupted environment in Egypt that resulted from the revolution. The police had disappeared, it was every man for themselves. There was a need for exchanging information, so Zabatak started to collect reports from anyone in order to push authorities to take action.

According to Mostafa Raafat, the project has started very well. People have found Zabatak through Facebook where an introduction video was posted. Mr. Raafat says that there have of course been inappropriate posts and crime reports, but that has not been a problem. Any false report can be easily detected, because they usually lack information such as evidence, description of the situation and the sender’s details. All the reports are being moderated in advance.

Mr. Raafat thinks that Zabatak could easily be applied in other countries, as well. The categories can be changed according to cultural features. The platform called Ushahidi, that is used in Zabatak, is the same that is also used in Harassmap. Mr. Raafat believes that some kind of advertisement co-operation could be possible between Harassmap and Zabatak.

In the future, most likely by the end of 2012, Zabatak will expand to Libya, Syria and Tunisia. Mr. Raafat tells that Zabatak has gotten positive feedback and support from the private sector. The government is rather corrupted, but it has some good institutes as well. After the revolution, probably partly thanks to Zabatak, people in Egypt have a better feel of security and safety. Zabatak has generated transparent statistics on corruption and different crimes. It truly has made the world a safer place to live in.

-Tia Tuovinen & Vesa Rantanen

Mostafa Raafat, in the left, with his colleagues Abbas Ibrahim and Ali Elhefnawy

First morning in Graz, in pictures!

Cloudy first morning in Graz

Wondering the street decorations...

Happy IMPs!

Gossiping?

Our Austrian specialist Sabrina feeling the IMP adventure spirit!

Organic apple sale

Sunshine, finally!

Cute dogs all around Graz

Trying to throw leaves....

Alex shoving the girls how the leaves SHOULD be thrown

We almost left poor Kristina behind!

The old bakery, definitely something I recommend visiting

Beautiful view from the central bridge

All IMPs think alike