EHF Fellow: Charlie Grosso
Empowering refugees to become digitally fluent, life-long learners
The question “what do you want to be when you grow up?” never sat well with Charlie Grosso. It was too confining. She was a renaissance woman with interests that spread the gamut and Charlie wanted to be everything and anything that fed her passions at the moment.
By sticking to this resolve, Charlie has been able to enjoy a successful work-life that has also fulfilled her soul.
“I’ve had a varied, interesting and unexpected career. If we look beyond the job titles and look at the core of the work, what I excel at is changing hearts and minds through storytelling.”
-Charlie Grosso
Charlie has worked as a writer, marketing consultant, photographer and creative director for top name brands. That combined with a worldview refined by 20 years on the road, more than 80 countries and six continents have led Charlie to accumulate an impressive resume and unique insight.
“Sometimes I think I’m the sand in the oyster; the disrupter and the discomfort that challenges and asks the hard questions.”
-Charlie Grosso
Currently, Charlie is working on a project that encourages other young people to become inspiring disrupters. Founded in 2016, Hello Future is a nonprofit organization that provides mobile phone-based digital literacy and digital citizenship training to adolescent refugees.
“We aim to create life-long learners and circumvent a lost generation within the greater refugee context.”
-Charlie Grosso
Charlie and her team “create a path forward for refugee teens by providing hardware, connectivity, and on-site education workshops that enable these youth to take advantage of existing educational and professional opportunities”.
Their on-site workshops are split into different modules, including digital skills, remote learning, and storytelling. The hope is that by teaching young refugees skills like email etiquette, social media safety, how to access online educational tools and advocacy through art, they will be better equipped to succeed in their new home countries.
Hello Future hires accredited local instructors to teach the courses in the country’s native language. Students in the workshops have the opportunity to become community liaisons and continue Hello Future’s influence as mentors and teacher’s assistants in future sessions.
“By providing hardware, connectivity, and training, Hello Future is a holistic program that is also designed to be a plug-n-play companion to larger NGO development efforts.”
-Charlie Grosso
The pilot program of Hello Future took place in 2017 for Syrian refugees living in the Barika (Arbat) Camp in Iraqi Kurdistan. 22 students participated in the five-week course that included one week of instruction and four weeks of guided student projects.
The students were made up of equal numbers of girls and boys between the ages of 13 to 18.
“Each of them was hungry and eager for something more — opportunities to learn; ways to improve their daily lives and future prospects; each yearning to connect with the world at large and share a bit about themselves and their communities. “ — Hello Future Website
A key learning for Charlie is that amidst the chaos that exists in forced migration, there lies an opportunity to strengthen the region as a whole. It requires the global community response to forced migration to shift from short-term “emergency response” to a long-term, development-focused, all-hands-on-deck investment from public, private and philanthropic sectors in areas from housing to civil society to social safety-nets.
Inclusive, long-term solutions can turn short-term challenges into growth opportunities and ensure regional stability. It is a new way to think about global security and how we invest around the world. Whether it’s for refugees in Africa, the Middle East or Latin America, investing in people in ways that give them freedom of choice over their lives is a winning formula.
Hello Future’s work is a step in such inclusive long-term solutions.
Moving forward, Charlie would like to see workshops being held all over the world.
She believes New Zealand will be the perfect home base for this venture.
“New Zealand presents a great opportunity for us to test and implement a different scenario for Hello Future’s programming.”
-Charlie Grosso
Charlie and her team are also interested in piloting their methodology in an indigenous community context as narrative diversity is essential
“A core part of our work is self-expression and creating both the ability and know-how to add to the predominant narrative of what shapes our culture and world-view at large. To do this with a healthy public-private partnership and support is a dream scenario and could help us rapidly scale and deploy deeper into multiple regions, including South Asia and MENA.”
-Charlie Grosso
She is looking forward to building those partnerships within the Edmund Hillary Fellowship — an oyster full of similarly disruptive grains of sand.
Are you a visionary entrepreneur, investor, or changemaker building solutions to global challenges? You can bring your vision to reality from New Zealand by joining the Edmund Hillary Fellowship. Apply here.
