Refvoice-A Startup Dedicated to Refugee Expression.
The Refugee Crisis Dominated the news back in 2016 when the RefVoice startup was initiated by its founder Mairy Bouli. It is a crisis that has not found an ultimate solution yet. We just tried to lessen the pain these people are carrying after losing everything dear to them. They may have lost their homeland, their house, and even loved ones but we wanted to help them through this startup not to lose themselves and the beauty they carry within themselves.
RefVoice is a startup initiated by Mary Bouli and was also presented at the infamous Startup Weekend Entrepreneurial Journalism 2016 in which I had also taken my own startup Artico.
I teamed up with Miry during the lesson we were both attending the “Social Issues, “Social Innovation and Corporate Responsibility” lesson by Ms. Betty Tsakarestou at Panteion University while both studying Communication, Media and Culture. If you have read my previous article upon my own startup, by now you would have understood how much our university helped us in order to evolve as people by giving us interesting and innovative initiatives and challenges.
If you want to know more about Corporate Social Responsibility(CSR) and understand furthermore why we developed this startup you can read this analytical paper about CSR:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/csr.132
We grabbed the chance to develop Mairy’s startup during this lesson because we thought that the tools and advice we will be getting, around social responsibility, will help this idea evolve, raise awareness, and help more and more people.
What is RefVoice? “RefVoice is an orchestrated effort, not only to help refugees but also acknowledge them as fellow humans”. A website where their stories and artwork will be uploaded. A place to host future refugee photo reporters and artists. Essentially, we thought of using art as a cultural bridge between refugees and locals. We do not work only for the refugees, we work with them!
You can find the actual official website on the link down below:
On the website, you can find actual work of refugees we met and told them about the effort we were making in order to get their ideas and art out there. Mairy, especially would go around and talk with various refugee organizations in order to get their approval to talk legally to the refugees and cooperate with them for this initiative. This is how she got the chance to gather pieces of artwork from them.
An official Medium Publication was also created to be used as part f the effort as well and as an easier and faster way for the refugees to publish their work on the go.
We have written several articles analyzing our idea and motives. This article, for example, describes the brainstorming process we followed while we were reevaluating the idea. Have you ever wondered what refugees have to say? Is it a normal thing for people who suffer like them to seal all types of expression? Have they lost every right to be artistic in any way just because they kicked them out of their own homeland? These and many more were the questions that came to our minds and that is why RefVoice was created!
We identified very carefully who could actually find our idea useful, who we are essentially serving. We needed to see if what we wanted to offer was actually needed.
Six months of hard work had their ups and downs, which we wrote down so we understand them better and learn from both of them.
The epitome of this initiative was our cooperation with Syrian refugee Rashed. We met various times with him and he essentially became our friend. He gave us a thorough interview that offered us valuable insights into the startup we were building. The best part was that we got to create a documentary by cooperating with a very experienced team. Through this documentary, we aimed to raise awareness of the need of refugees to express themselves, get their stories and dreams out in the public. The need to stop feeling alone!
You can find Rashed’s interviews both in Greek and English down below:
You can find more articles about this effort and the rest of the social media that were created on this retrospective article we created:
Our efforts continued for a while but as of today, it is not as active as it is used to be. Refugees come and go and it is not as easy to keep in touch with most of them. The deeper value and meaning of all this was to help a huge wave of people at a time of need, at a time when the problem was at its peak here in Greece, and to a certain extent, we did that. most of all we succeeded in creating awareness in our teens and we got to see up close the erks of a socially responsible startup.
Photos used in this article are all ours.
Photos used in the rest of the articles linked above and used in our social media came from our cooperation with the famous photo reporter Aggelos Barai. We thank him a lot.
