Conversations Unbound

Currently, there are over 70 million people forcibly displaced around the world. Many face severe challenges to earn income, such as policies inhibiting access to labor markets. As importantly, negative narratives surrounding refugees marginalize these populations in their host countries and globally. In this age of technological advancement and global connectivity, CU leverages technology to provide refugees with a source of income and encourages cross-cultural understanding. CU pairs college students studying Arabic or Spanish with a refugee tutor. These one-on-one conversation sessions are online, and tutors receive payment for each lesson. All CU programs are integrated into universities’ language curricula, providing students with robust educational experiences. Yet more than a homework assignment, CU encourages transnational relationships to form. Distance, borders, and language no longer stand as a divisive force. If scaled globally, CU can build language learning around the globe and offer income to thousands of refugees.

With today’s statistics reporting 70.8 million people forcibly displaced, one person becomes displaced from their home every two seconds. Millions have had their lives disrupted due to human, economic, and/or environmental insecurity, forcing them to leave their homes and home countries. In the process, many have lost their means of income and put their education or careers on hold, limiting their opportunities. Additionally, many perceive forcibly displaced people to lack skills they can share with their new communities and are instead seen as a drain on government resources. A Pew Center report found that 51% of the European citizens surveyed wanted fewer to no more migrants to enter their countries, while surveys in the U.S. found that 75% of registered voters in 2017 said illegal immigration was a very big problem (Connor & Krogstad, 2018). Without nation-level institutional frameworks to support refugees and with heightened levels of societal resentment towards these communities, forcibly displaced people remain structurally marginalized, which hinders their ability to integrate into their host communities and connect with a global community. 

CU works directly with refugees who are fluent Arabic or Spanish speakers. We accept individuals with all levels of language teaching experience, making CU extremely accessible. CU selects tutors who have a love for their language and a dedication to sharing their culture with college students. 

Refugees have played a major role in the initiation, development, and growth of CU. To launch, our team worked with our tutors to establish a program that would provide meaningful financial support, respect their cultural norms, and enable them to receive payment despite limited access to financial institutions. Since our implementation, our tutors are consulted regularly for feedback on how to improve our programs for students and our impact on their communities. Additionally, we hold annual webinar workshops to provide a space to listen to our tutor’s thoughts and bring our tutor and administrative team together. Finally, 25% of CU’s board members have a background in forced displacement, which brings their unique expertise to CU’s senior management. 

Working with CU provides our tutors with a source of income. Our programs also help them develop tutoring skills, enabling many to launch their careers, move towards greater economic independence, and regain control of their lives.

Conversations Unbound empowers refugees as Arabic or Spanish language tutors for college students. Our programs utilize a unique, tailored technology platform to connect language-learners with CU tutors and provide refugees with a source of income.CU works with universities to integrate our programs as a core component of their language-learning curricula: completion of CU sessions becomes a percentage of students’ final class grade. Since language-learners have limited class time to practice their speaking skills, these one-on-one sessions have proven to significantly advance students’ speaking abilities. Furthermore, CU tutors bring their unique cultural perspective and experience of forcible displacement to these CU sessions, which is material that cannot be taught through textbooks. In addition to promoting language-learning, CU creates a space where refugees are the leaders in the conversation about forced displacement. They are not just included—indeed, they are placed at the forefront of the discussion about the issue and the possible solutions.

By empowering refugees as language tutors, CU creates job opportunities, which improves refugees’ financial stability. Tutors are paid per session, and, unlike other organizations working with refugee tutors, CU tutors receive 100% of their earnings. Tutors are able to determine their availability, allowing CU to fit alongside their other jobs and responsibilities. The income received through CU and the flexibility of our programs provides a substantial income for these tutors while still enabling them to pursue other jobs in their host communities. Many of CU’s tutors have become successful online tutors, earning over $500 per month through tutoring sessions. With more income, tutors are able to spend more in their host communities, which promotes broader economic growth.

CU is the first and only language program that specifically connects college students with refugee tutors. CU’s program has successfully integrated conversation sessions as an integral component of university language courses. Other language programs such as Chatterbox and NaTakallam connect people with refugees. However, individual interest in language-learning may come and go. By working with universities, CU has a constant stream of student “clients.” Further, by engaging at the college-level, CU hopes to complement young adults’ educational experiences and help develop global citizens. 

We differ from other language platforms like Rosetta Stone that are technology-driven. Instead of using pre-scripted materials, CU provides live services, helping language skills and building cross-cultural relationships. Additionally, tutoring services, like Fluenz Immersion, require their tutors to have a bachelor’s degree and professional teaching experience. This is limiting, especially for those whose education was cut short when forced to leave their homes. CU has a unique selection process that opens the tutoring positions to anyone who is a fluent speaker with any dialect of Spanish or Arabic.

Furthermore, most language learning programs, including NaTakallam that engage with refugee tutors, profit off of the refugee tutors’ work. CU prides itself on ensuring that our tutors receive 100% of their earnings.

Finally, CU’s new technology platform will provide an innovative mechanism to enable these conversations, while addressing tutors’ and students’ needs. Importantly, we plan to incorporate new fintech solutions into our platform to increase the ease of paying our tutors who have limited access to financial institutions.

Currently, CU utilizes an existing online language learning platform that helps students and tutors to connect and schedule tutoring sessions. Due to CU’s growth, we have now outgrown this platform. Expanding CU requires a tailored and cutting-edge online platform to facilitate language lessons for student learners, while taking refugees’ barriers into consideration. We seek MIT Solve funding to develop a platform that will seamlessly connect students and tutors; provide educational resources to students and tutors; enable our team to track students’ progress; transfer payments to tutors directly; aggregate impact data; and increase the overall efficiency of the program. This platform will be developed by a team of refugee coders. By developing a new online platform tailored to student language learners needs and made accessible to refugees, CU will become more marketable to universities, allowing us to expand our programs and provide tutoring opportunities to more forcibly displaced people.

Importantly, our platform must enable seamless money transfers that allow CU tutors to easily receive payments despite their limited access to financial institutions. The fintech market for refugees has exciting new developments—Mastercard and Equity Bank are just two examples of companies working in this space. CU aims to partner with a fintech organization dedicated to making finance accessible to refugee communities and integrate these new approaches into our platform so that CU can be more accessible to displaced populations around the world.

After developing this tailored tutoring program for college students and refugee tutors over the past three years, we found that, in 2019 alone, over 92% of our students reported that CU helped improve their speaking ability; over 95% of students reported that CU added a unique and beneficial component to classroom language learning; and over 81% of students reported that CU helped them feel more comfortable in class. Of the tutors we have worked with, we have had a 79% retention rate, which demonstrates that our tutors value CU’s programs.

Based on our findings, CU believes that if forcibly displaced people are provided with an easily accessible means to earn money tutoring their native language, they will become CU tutors and increase their weekly earnings. On the other hand, if students are provided with a robust language-learning experience that enables them to practice their conversation skills with a native speaker, their conversational skills will improve and their confidence in their speaking abilities will increase. 

CU’s two strategic activities include: (1) working with universities globally to include CU as an integral component of their language curricula and (2) providing exceptional student and tutor support. We intend that these activities will: (1) improve universities language learner’s education (2) improve students’ speaking abilities in a new language and (3) provide tutors with a substantial, additional income. By 2024, CU programs will bring $55,000 in additional earnings to refugees and over 1,865 students will have received CU’s services.

Since our inception in 2015, CU has worked with over 20 tutors and over 430 students, which has brought over $13,200 in income to our tutors.

In the next year, we aim to work with three more university partners, which will enable us to double our tutor team and provide $900 in additional income to our tutors, or approximately $14,100 total.

In five years, CU’s goal is to partner with 25 universities. In total, CU will have a team of 100 forcibly displaced tutors, provide services to 1865 students and bring $55,000 in earnings to our tutors.

In one year, CU plans to expand our program to three additional universities, which will allow us to double our tutor team. This year will be a key step in our development as an organization because we will solidify our university expansion strategy and work alongside language professors to incorporate CU into their existing Arabic and Spanish language curriculum.

Our five-year plan is to integrate CU into 25 universities, which will enable us to have a team of 100 tutors and reach an estimated 1865 students. During these five years, our team will focus primarily on integrating CU into Arabic and Spanish language courses. However, we also plan to expand our reach and pilot French and Farsi programs. Once CU is incorporated into language curricula, it becomes a self-sustaining mechanism as class after class utilizes CU’s program, enabling our organization to impact a consistent pool of students every year. By 2024, CU will have provided approximately $55,000 in additional income to our tutors.

After working with our partnering digital language-learning platform for three years, we have outgrown their services because they are not tailored to college students and refugees and do not enable our team to easily measure impact. This requires our organization to explore new, innovative opportunities to enable and maximize our growth. Secondly, we have found that the university language learning departments require unique, targeted strategies to incentivize them to adopt CU programming into their curriculum. We are proud of our organization’s nimbleness and ability to adjust our business development strategy in order to attract universities’ language departments, but we face obstacles to continued growth without future partnerships.

To address our technical needs, we have decided to partner with Re:Coded, an organization that teaches conflict-affected youth (many of whom are refugees) how to code and helps them find jobs. The Re:Coded team will develop our new online platform that will seamlessly connect students and tutors; provide educational resources to students and tutors; enable our team to track students’ progress; transfer payments to tutors directly; aggregate impact data; and increase the overall efficiency of the program. We are very excited about this partnership because it allows CU to support conflict-affected youth via the development of our website, demonstrating our commitment to incorporating these populations into our organization at every stage of our growth. Further, the creation of this specialized digital platform will support our refugee tutors.

In order to devise a clear and effective expansion strategy, we have surrounded ourselves with experts in the field, specifically language professors, deans of faculty, and language-lab instructors. These mentors have coached us on the challenges faced by college language departments and have anticipated professors’ concerns about implementing a program like CU. Through their mentorship, we have been able to demonstrate that CU is not a threat to existing language programs, professors, or language-lab programming. This has helped us structure our outreach to highlight how CU is a unique, one-of-a-kind opportunity for students to practice their conversational skills in an informal setting and learn from people who have been displaced but does not jeopardize existing curricula.

14 part-time staff

8 board of directors (25% with a history of forced displacement)

As a team of language learners—either past or current—all members have experienced the difficulties of learning a new language. Together our team speaks, or is learning to speak Arabic, Hebrew, French, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, and English. We all have first-hand experience learning languages in a college setting—we know the importance of having one-on-one conversational experience. We also understand the intimacy of the college language department programming, which enables us to more easily navigate these bureaucratic systems and integrate our programming in new language courses. Additionally, our senior leadership team—Elise Shea and Jessica Schwed—both have experience working directly with forcibly displaced populations in refugee camps.

Importantly, our team has sought out the expertise of our forcibly displaced tutoring team throughout every step of CU’s development process. Our tutors’ knowledge and expertise have guided our team and taught us how to create a program that meaningfully impacts forcibly displaced people, addresses the barriers they face, and provides a robust educational experience for students.

CU’s Board of Directors is comprised of an extremely talented and diverse group of professionals who bring their wisdom as language professors, lawyers, history professors, entrepreneurs, marketing experts, language tutors, program coordinators, and community organizers. 25% of our board has a background in forced displacement

Conversations Unbound has three groups of partners:

• Vassar College, University of Richmond, and Michigan State University are all partnering universities that integrate CU into their language learning curricula

• CU partners with Small Projects Istanbul, ReDI School for Digital Integration, The American University of Kurdistan, ECHO100 Plus, and Sin Fronteras to find, train, and on-board language tutors

CU will work with Re:Coded—an organization that teaches conflict-affected youth how to code and helps them find jobs—to develop our new online platform

Key customers and beneficiaries: CU works directly with forcibly displaced people to onboard them onto our program as Arabic or Spanish language tutors. We then partner with universities to provide online, one-on-one language tutoring sessions to Arabic and Spanish language learners. Product and services provided: CU acts as the specialized intermediary connecting universities/students and forcibly displaced tutors; provides exceptional support services for both parties; ensures a smooth program start, duration, and completion; aggregates data on student and tutor performance; shares data with university faculty to provide them with a robust understanding of their students’ language-learning experience; and provides regular, collaborative workshops for tutors to advance their language tutoring ability and provides them with tailored resources. Impact and revenue model: CU services are free to university students. Instead, the universities’ language departments provide funding to incorporate CU services into their course curriculum. CU tutors receive 100% of their earnings—our team does not believe in profiting off the hard work of our tutors. We are sustained by generous donors and grants, and will soon implement a service fee to support our financial sustainability that will charge all partnering institutions a flat fee for using our customized support services.

Though we are currently entirely supported by grant and donor-based funding, we have a staged plan to become increasingly self-reliant over the next five years. In 2020, we will implement a service fee system that will charge our partners for our specialized services for their students. We are also considering expanding our client audience and offering our services to non-university-based language-learners. With the new growth of our team, we have started targeted outreach strategies to build a network of regular donors and corporate sponsors that will provide another stream of funding to CU.

Expanding CU requires a tailored and cutting-edge online platform to facilitate language lessons for student learners, while taking refugees’ barriers into consideration. We seek MIT Solve funding to develop a platform that will seamlessly connect students and tutors; provide tailored educational resources to each party; enable our team to track students’ progress; transfer payments to tutors directly; aggregate impact data; and increase the overall efficiency of the program. This platform will be developed by a team of refugee coders. With this platform, CU will become more marketable to universities around the world. MIT Solve provides the expertise and a diverse collection of partners that would help guide our team in the creative design of this platform, ensuring that it provides the maximum support to our tutor team and student learners.

Furthermore, we will greatly benefit from the MIT Solve community’s mentorship on our business model and funding and revenue model, as well as their support bolstering our monitoring and evaluation systems to ensure that we are collecting quality data to support and market our programs.

Finally, as mentioned in the technology section, CU seeks to partner with an innovative fintech organization dedicated to designing inclusive financial solutions for refugees. Through MIT Solve, we aim to partner with an organization that will add this key dimension to our platform: the ability for our tutors to receive payment regardless of their displaced circumstances or lack of access to financial institutions, making CU the most inclusive earnings program for refugees around the world.

To continue our operations and propel our organization, CU must continue to partner with universities’ language departments worldwide. We seek university partners who recognize the value of enabling their students to practice their conversational Arabic or Spanish skills in an informal setting outside of the classroom as a means to complement and augment these students’ educational process. These partners will also share CU’s dedication to recognizing forcibly displaced communities’ talents and elevating their voices as language tutors.

Importantly, we seek a fintech partner skilled at developing services to promote financial inclusion and provide marginalized populations with increased access to capital. We have identified various organizations in this space and would appreciate MIT Solve’s assistance liaising with these companies and establishing a functioning partnership together.

Currently, there are over 70 million people forcibly displaced around the world. Many face severe challenges to earn income, such as policies inhibiting access to labor markets. As importantly, negative narratives surrounding refugees marginalize these populations in their host countries and globally. In this age of technological advancement and global connectivity, CU leverages technology to provide refugees with a source of income and encourage cross-cultural understanding among student language learners. CU pairs college students studying Arabic or Spanish with a refugee tutor. These one-on-one conversation sessions are online, and tutors receive payment for each lesson. CU provides an opportunity for refugees to earn additional income and increase their economic autonomy, facilitating opportunities for these people to earn a supplementary income while integrating into their new communities. This increased financial stability promotes self-reliance and empowers refugees as skillful individuals in the global language-learning economy.

Inclusion is also promoted on the opposite side of the screen: for students working with CU tutors, these conversations encourage transnational relationships to form. Distance, borders, and language no longer stand as a divisive force.

CU seeks funding to develop a cutting-edge platform to facilitate language lessons for student learners, while taking refugees’ barriers into consideration. Furthermore, CU will partner with a fintech company to integrate financial inclusion mechanisms specific to refugees into our platform so CU tutors can easily access their earnings despite their lack of access to financial institutions. If scaled globally, CU can build language-learning worldwide and offer income to thousands of refugees.