We're a team based at Columbia University working with NGOs around Greece and the Levant building technology to serve the most urgent pain-points refugees and organizations face. This summer, our tech project will be launching in camps serving tens of thousands of refugees.

We've been working on this for two years and have had a great impact so far. We had 5000 members in our group but this summer, we're stepping up all of our impact work. We are working with major partners in the NGO/refugee space, including Gaia Association, and are also in talks with UN bodies. Our project will allow refugees to access free legal support, healthcare, education, craft workshop, high level skills training and more. Refugees-providers and non-refugee providers exchange skills and services using a points system.

Getting to the Heart of Inequality:

Only 1% of the 68 million displaced people in the world today are legally permitted to earn money in the places where they live. The vast majority are forced into poverty despite having monetizable skills. This is because asylum applications come in faster than they can be processed.

We have been building a new economic system that is based on time instead of money. Time is the one value distributed most evenly among people. No one chooses where or when they were born but every person on this earth has the same 24 hours in a day. Under our current system, the value of the average refugee's labor is worth 1/30th or 1/50th of that of a lawyer, for instance. Lawyers can charge upwards of $500/hour, whilst the average refugee may earn $3-10/hour (if at all). This makes it incredibly difficult for refugees to attain any kind of social mobility or legal assistance. Under our system, a refugee can provide a service and earn the same number of points for their time as any other user. This is a fundamental rethinking of the way value is acknowledged under the current system--one that insists on equality in the face of injustice.

​Our Team:

• ​Soraya Beheshti, founder/CEO, is an anthropologist and Middle East Studies student at Columbia University. She has been working in the refugee space for over 2 years and is also the Middle East director for Crimson Education
• Sam Caldwell, Coordinator, was the coordinator for the Emergency Response Center International (ERCI), where he worked on rescue operations for refugees arriving in the Mediterranean
• Jon Schory, Project Manager, and Shikhar Bakhda, Blockchain Developer, are both computer scientists at Columbia University
• Riyaan Bakhda and Faycal Said are both mobile and web developers. Riyaan is based in India and Faycal is based in France. Faycal and Soraya met during the summer that she spent with asylum seekers in Paris, 2016.

Launching in Greece:

The team spent last summer meeting with organizations on the ground in Greece (having already done so over the past two years in other areas of the Middle East and Europe). We learned what kinds of struggles refugees and NGOs (local/grassroots and transnational) face, and how our technology could be built to assist their objectives. 

This August, we will be returning to Greece (and then Lebanon) to implement our project. We have partnerships with several large and small organizations and camps, and are currently working to secure more. We will organize a week of workshops that will help refugees learn about what kind of services they can get on the app and how to maximize the benefits they can get from it. We will also be organizing activities and sessions throughout the week, including group sessions of some of the services that will be available on the app. 

And after that?

Once we have successfully launched in Greece, we will repeat our activities in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Ethiopia, Kenya and the Sudan with our NGO partners.

We think this project could change the world, and at the very least, will play a role in the challenge against global economic inequality. 

Our users form new communities of solidarity, which are highly personalized, yet leverage the power of global networks. They exist in spatial orbits that are at the same time smaller and larger than the nation. Sensationalist media capitalizes on the critical lack of first-hand interactions people have with refugees.
Facilitating inter-personal connections addresses the problem of increasing racism while empowering the 99% of refugees who do not yet have papers to establish themselves as valued, talented members of society. Not passive recipients of aid, but active agents of innovation and creation.