2018 Humanity in Action Warsaw Fellowship

GośćInność – initiative created by Nina Bilal combining education with fun of cooking and uniting teenagers and migrants at the table. And us – three women passionate about making the world more conscious about migrant and refugee rights (and also women who love to eat!).  Us! Małgosia, Anna and Nawojka, credits: Alicja Szulc Opening the envelope and getting to know the possible challenges was exciting. And once we found out - we couldn’t decide. All three of them were interesting and to we felt we could somehow contribute to all of them. After consulting with Nina, we picked the education challenge – to prepare a workshop scenario which combined learning how to cook from a migrant (a trademark of GośćInność’s initiative) with different educational activities providing pupils the basic knowledge about the topic of migration, with a special focus on women’s rights. Where did we start? From our target group! We created a survey to get to know what teenagers aged betw...

Often, it seems business frameworks are used at the expense of human rights in the world. It only takes examples like Standing Rock , Rana Plaza or Apple’s conflict minerals to see business in opposition to global justice. Our team - Onur Aksu, Chelsea Racelis, and Malgorzata Zurowska - was challenged with the question: How can we use business approaches to support human rights and social justice?  With Humanity in Action Poland as our output phase organization, our team was tasked with developing a new, sustainable revenue stream that would bring the values of human rights and diversity to more people. It was a unique challenge, especially while our peers’ had tasks such as “How do we combat hate speech on the Internet?” or, “How can we reduce stigma toward the LGBTQ+ community?” We had something very tangible to work with, yet lots of room for creativity.  In our design thinking workshop earlier in the fellowship, we learned the value of entertaining “crazy ...

Daisy Astorga Gonzalez: The first moment I stepped into Kitchen of Conflicts, I thought of my mother and grandmother. They could have easily been working there as immigrants; the joy they would have had to share our Mexican cuisine.  Larissa Weiss: ‘... the act of volunteering creates an empathy that creates conditions for peace.’ (Syd Boyd) When deciding to enlarge the community of the Kitchen of Conflicts through a volunteer application form, I immediately thought of this quote that was published by the United Nations Young Peacebuilders. To build community means to build freedom means to build peace.  Rozanna Bogacz: I entered Kitchen of Conflicts confident about the change that we could bring there, but the first try at the conversation without common language showed me the actual challenge they are meeting. After two weeks, I have become only more impressed and inspired.  Kitchen of Conflicts (KoC) is a social enterprise and foundation that empl...

Ten days and three women from three different countries. The task: design a social entrepreneurship product addressing the challenges of teenage girls in contemporary Polish society. One of the most immediate and obvious challenges is apparent from the very beginning: only one member of the team comes from Poland.  Will we be able to create something Polish teenage girls will like, use, and (most importantly for a social entrepreneurship challenge) actually want to buy? How will we find data and research on our target demographic or develop content without relegating one member of the team to doing nothing but translating Polish to English (our common working language) all day? How could a Ukrainian and an American possibly know what Polish teenage girls find engaging, trendy, or cool?  Within minutes of our first brainstorming meeting we came to an important realization: our experiences as women, and more specifically as former teenage girls, were markedly s...

“You have the magic within you, now go change the world.” This quote was written for us in the program book of the HIA Fellowship. This phrase helped guide us throughout the process of the output phase of the fellowship.  At the start of the output phase, we were presented with three challenges to choose from. After a great deal of brainstorming and several consultation meetings with HIA Poland, the organization we were working with, we chose to take up the technological challenge in order to best meet the needs of HIA Poland, who aimed to use technology to combat hate speech online among youth. Our main assumption was that if gamers use less hate speech online, they will also use less of it in the real world.  Working on the project was challenging, mostly because we were new to the field of chatbots, especially when it came to using chatbots toward a topic with as serious implications as hate speech. We first found challenges with improving the effectiveness of the ...

Teenagers. They’re angsty, awkward, and sometimes angry, often for good reason. Teens are the chronically misunderstood, the frequently patronized, and the often ignored of our society. Their youthful ambition and adolescent, singular strength of mind will soon propel them (and, whether we like it or not, us too), into a future where they, at last, are the ones in charge. They represent the imminent future, and yet older people often do not know how to talk to teens—whether about their emotional lives, or merely what they want for supper.  Our group: Kamil Kuhr, Kenny Martin and Larysa Panasyk Photo Credit: Alicja Szulc These contradictions and difficulties of teenage life hit queer teenagers especially hard. In the input phase of the 2018 Warsaw Humanity in Action Fellowship, we had a session with Slava Melnyk from Kampania Przeciw Homofobii (Campaign Against Homophobia, Polish abbreviation KPH) that illuminated some of these problems—problems that are specific to the q...

Our journey began from observing Interwencja Pasażerska campaign with our own eyes. The campaign invited passengers to take a ride at estimated hours during three days in a row, where volunteers would explain methods of Bystander Intervention or simply - possible ways of behavior when they witness violence in public transport. It was not only useful to see the ways of turning attention to the issues of violence against foreigners in public transport, but also to interact with the outside world. The gains of the campaign include attention and openness to talk from random passengers. One memorable detail is Hanna Arendt’s quote at the tram’s back window: “I was no longer of the opinion that one can simply be a bystander.”  Quote of Hanna Arendt in the tram by the Passennger's Intervention These days of tram rides together with the tech workshop from HIA Poland inspired us to make a chatbot for Facebook Messenger, which turned out to be more accessible than we thought....

Did you know that “the new fascism in Europe is Islamism” or that “recently thousands of Arab men sexually attacked, humiliated and raped hundreds of women”? I don´t think so. I didn´t know either. But according to the vice mayor of Vienna, Johann Gudenus or the right-wing party leader from the Netherlands Geert Wilders this is happening right now. Shocked about the language? I was shocked! However, during my Humanity in Action Fellowship in Warsaw, I found out that those are only two examples of a phenomenon of rising hate speech, xenophobia and populism in Europe. As a German Muslim with a migration background unfortunately I see hate speech as a component of my life that I have to encounter, whether it is in the media or on the Internet. So, for me it was even more interesting to figure out how the situation in Poland would be like and what elements I could use to effectively counteract hate speech.  "Today immigrants, tomorrow terrorists" at one of anti-refugee dem...

Do you live in a free country? Do you consider yourself a free person? If we asked these questions three years ago in Poland, a country, which only finally gained freedom in 1989 after devastating years of the Second World War and more than 40 years of fighting against communism, the answer would probably be “yes.” However, since the electoral victory of the right-wing and conservative Law and Justice (PiS) and the following months of rapid legislation changes, massive protests against the restriction of the Polish abortion law, and penalization of blaming Poland for Nazi crimes during the Second World War, the answer is now not as clear as it used to be. Nelson Mandela once said, “For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” We’re free – we can choose where we’ll eat lunch today, whether our house will be wooden or marble, which footballers’ t-shirt our child will bring to the football practice, or whic...

The session about the Greek immigration "crises", follows-up with a true moving story between our fellow Rena and Offa, a Syrian artist, who now lives in Greece.  I was born in Chios on March 16th, 1993. She was born in Aleppo on December 25th, 1984. I was raised in Chora, the center of the island, with the smell of jasmine flavouring my neighbourhood, like allspice does. She was raised in a small, picturesque alley in the center of the town, which accompanies all of her childhood memories in Syria. From a very young age, she remembers herself drawing. She remembers herself observing the world and transferring instinctively whatever she sees, hears, smells, or feels in small sketches. From that age, I discovered a raw need to read about art and the artists who changed our view of the world throughout the centuries. This need became a part of my studies later on. Her strong feel and passion for colouring her figures with oils, carbons, and crayons later became her fie...

“Why should I care?”  “This problem doesn’t affect me.”  “I already support other causes.”  Accepting that the causes to which we commit ourselves are not universal passions is tough. Over the past few years as I’ve poured my heart into my work with the Reclaimed Project in Sub Saharan Africa, I’ve had to come to terms with a difficult reality: not everyone cares about the cause as much as I do. Despite how obvious it may seem that humanity should share an obligation toward your particular cause, articulating the value of donating toward your organization to a potential supporter can seem impossible.  Additionally, the traditional, charity-focused model of human-rights and humanitarian work is becoming increasingly less viable—according to a study done by Texas A&M University, charitable donations have dropped by 10% since the year 2000. Therefore, it is now crucial to consider what supporting your cause reciprocates to your audience. In doing ...