The Group Sing That Almost Made a ‘Hard Man’ Cry

Wielding the Power of Purposeful Storytelling

The author (third from right) with some of the amazing UNLEASH talents in Copenhagen.

There are no direct flights to Denmark from Iraq. So when Hama Osman took his very first, red-tape-laden trip outside of his home country, he had to board his first-ever plane (the first of two flights, with an extended immigration delay in Turkey), his first ferry, and his first train.

Nevertheless, when I met Hama in Denmark, he was bubbling with excitement over having just seen his first ocean on this journey.

The awe and wonder of taking in that natural view for the first time stands in contrast to the lifetime’s worth of more disturbing sights he has seen in his 26 years: frequent explosions that left countrymen decapitated. Bursts of unexpected gunfire on a regular basis that decimated friends and strangers alike. Buildings in ruins, abject poverty. These traumatic experiences had made him, in his words, a “hard man,” and he learned to sublimate all of the violence and despair he had seen.

And then he found himself in Brandbjerg, in the Danish countryside at
a “folk high school” (a uniquely Danish offering that is sort of summer camp/boarding school meets adult-education program),where tradition calls to start every morning with a singalong. As Hama joined a roomful of young people from all over the world, singing John Lennon’s “Imagine” (the lyrics printed in a book for all those global citizens not familiar with the work), this
“hard man” almost broke down and cried.

I met Hama in Denmark through the UNLEASH program. UNLEASH is the
brainchild of a Danish philanthropic executive, who envisioned an
event in which 1,000 specially selected millennials from around the
world would be brought to Denmark — at no expense to them — to pair
into teams and compete in an innovation lab, in which they would
ideate entrepreneurial ideas that could help achieve the UN’s
Sustainable Development Goals.

UNLEASH indeed took place this past August and, when all was said and done, 1,000 young people — age 20 to 35 — from 129 countries convened and formed almost 200 teams. The ideas each team produced were astonishing in their range and scope: a West African initiative that uses fly larvae to transform food waste into animal feed. A Blockchain-backed effort
to root out counterfeit anti-malarial drugs. An idea to quickly identify recyclable material in post-earthquake rubble (which also reduces the amount of waste sent to landfills).

While the innovations ideated within one week were impressive — and
testimony to the ability of complete strangers from different
countries being able to overcome cultural and language barriers to
produce them at all — the biographical stories of these millennial
talents were even more incredible.

The author and Hama Osman, in Brandbjerg, Denmark. (Credit: Astrid Maria Rasmussen)

Beyond Hama (whose nickname among his friends in Iraq is “Hollywood,” because of all the American movies he watches), there was also:

• the courageous Kenyan journalist, a woman who
  reports on gender-based violence in her country. She often has
  unpleasant encounters with male members of the victims’ families she
  reports on, who’d rather not call attention to the rape of their
  14-year-old kin, for fear of bringing shame on the family.
• the New York fashion designer, who was born with cystic
  fibrosis. She is looking to design hospital gowns with “dignity” for
  patients who spend an inordinate amount of time in treatment
  facilities.
• and the Burundian entrepreneur, who had to flee the violence
  in his home country and who is now living in a Kenyan refugee camp.
  From there he took courses online at a U.S. college, from which he has graduated, and is now trying to create a MOOC (massive open online course) for his fellow refugees.

Purposeful Storytelling

There are two through-lines in these narratives: one is that each of
these incredible souls is committed to creating entrepreneurial
opportunities with “purpose.” And the other is that their own personal
stories are so heart-warming as to seem works of fiction.

This intersection of the purposeful and the compelling grabbed my attention as I was on my own journey. I have spent a long career in journalism,
holding executive positions at a range of publishing platforms,
including a newspaper (New York Daily News), an alt-weekly (Boston
Phoenix), and magazines (including Spy), before settling in for seven
years in the digital world (AOL and HuffPost).

At a personal crossroads after leaving HuffPost — fearing I was aging
out of conventional employment options — I started exploring
opportunities as a consultant, and repeatedly found roads that
traveled through Scandinavia, which led to an opportunity with
UNLEASH. Sensing a chance to grab attention for the program via the personal stories of these special millennial talents, I created a blog platform for them on Medium, where I encouraged them all to write about their
backgrounds, their hopes, and their experiences in Denmark. More than
250 of them took up the challenge (you can read their stories here)
and quietly a social-media sensation started to develop. The
slow-bake process of publishing and socializing the blogs of this
talent pool helped make the #UNLEASHLab2017 hashtag the number-1 trending topic in Denmark on Twitter for more than 60 hours after it officially
launched this August.

The proof of concept having worked, I excitedly had conversations with
a dear old friend, Giovanni Rodriguez, who had found similar success in
marrying storytelling to purposeful enterprises in the tech and
nonprofit spaces. He was was exploring this same terrain, looking to
create mission-oriented editorial and teach storytelling techniques.
He had been doing this with the Obama White House, Google, and in the
Latino community, particularly in his native Puerto Rico, where he had
joined the board of Parallel18, a regional economic initiative built
on top of a technology accelerator.

Joining forces with two other talented partners — Alejandro Badillo and
G.Antonio Pascual-Sosa, both based in Puerto Rico — we arrived at the
enterprise Silicon Valley Story Lab.

That new venture officially launches today. In this endeavor, we’ll be
working with organizations that are committed to aligning their top
and bottom lines for positive social impact. We’ll be working to help
jumpstart the economy on the devastated island of Puerto Rico. And, in
this age of Big Content, we’ll be teaching purpose-driven
organizations to think like great media companies, to help amplify
their message through the art and science of storytelling.

It seems that practically every organization — whether it’s a large commercial enterprise, non-profit, or tech startup — wants to be purpose driven, and our mandate is to help them become just that.

We are inspired by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, which are a clear blueprint for making sure that not one of the seven billion people on the planet is left behind. But the most effective way to spread the gospel of the Goals is to successfully tell one small story at a time.

And we’re looking forward to working in Singapore next summer. That’s where we will meet the next class of Hama Osmans, in UNLEASH 2018.

Visit the Silicon Valley Story Lab on Facebook here. Follow TheSVSL on Twitter here.