SPEAK

SPEAK fights against the social exclusion of migrants and refugees caused by social barriers, discrimination, and anti-migrant rhetoric. SPEAK developed a web platform where people sign up to learn or to help others learn a language but the experience happens face to face, in groups, offline. While people learn with each other, they are breaking barriers and making new friends. From this simple service, SPEAK is fostering the creation of spaces where newcomers have the opportunity to share the value they bring and develop meaningful relationships with locals. The team also trains newcomers willing to set up SPEAK in their city, creating their own job. This growth model will allow SPEAK to create a global network of 100 inclusive cities by 2024.

Every week 3 million people move to a new city, and there are several reasons for a family or individual to be forced to leave their home. Whether for a better life or the urgency of a war scenario, the problem of integration arises in the challenges migrants and refugees find in their destination. Language barrier, lack of friends and family and bureaucratic processes are one side of the coin, while ethnic and religious discrimination are the other. SPEAK fights against the social exclusion of migrants and refugees caused by social barriers, discrimination, and anti-migrant rhetoric. Many integration policies fail from the beginning due to their incomplete vision of this complex challenge. The sociocultural integration needs to be understood and worked in each of its causes - thus a holistic approach is required.

There are 258 million migrants worldwide (IOM, 2017) -- this is a global problem and the growing political tensions, and climate catastrophes only exacerbate it. Forced displacement is not decelerating, with the number of refugees under UNHCR’s mandate exceeding 20 million in 2018 for the first time (UNHCR, 2018).

At SPEAK everyone can apply to learn or to help others learn languages and cultures: locals who want to learn new languages and connect with different cultures, and newcomers who are in the process of adapting to a new city. SPEAK uses the motivation and need that people have to learn a language to bring together people of different contexts in an informal environment, where they stand as equals, with a high probability of creating strong and meaningful relationships. 

SPEAK is a community-based solution, where both newcomers and locals participate actively in the solution. SPEAK places migrants and refugees as ambassadors for cultural dialogue in their communities, empowering newcomers to take action and it helps mitigating cultural stigma by demonstrating the richness of multiculturalism to local communities.

At SPEAK, while people learn with each other, they are breaking barriers and prejudice. The creation of an informal support network unlocks many opportunities that contribute to a greater social inclusion. For example, members often help each other with job offers or renting a house thanks to the power of their SPEAK community.

SPEAK promotes the emergence of communities where locals and migrants meet to share their culture and develop meaningful bonds by providing a web platform for individuals to facilitate informal language learning environments and community events. 

It follows an Online2Offline model -- members sign up on a web platform to learn or help others learn a language but the experience happens offline, face to face. This experience consists of community-led language groups that meet once a week for 90-minute sessions for 12 weeks, and community-organized events like language exchanges, city treasure hunts or cooking sessions. 

The informal environment and methodology used allow participants to learn with each other, while at the same time breaking barriers and creating meaningful relationships, creating a multicultural community where cultural heritage is cherished. This network has created opportunities for newcomers to get informal recommendations and guidance regarding specific needs and integration challenges. SPEAK adopts a bottom-up approach that works only with the participation of its community. The program is entirely composed of members of the SPEAK community, having buddies (people who help others learn) and participants be interchangeable (i.e. buddies can become participants of other language groups, and vice versa). Having this bottom-up approach generates a feeling of self-worth, as beneficiaries feel responsible for their own transformation and integration process. Moreover, this builds stronger support networks, and a greater sense of belonging throughout.

These offline experiences - language groups and events - take place in underutilized spaces from organizations that are interested in having new people and activities in their facilities. These can be, for instance, libraries, bars, or cultural associations.

SPEAK’s Online2Offline operating model allows the management team to handle and automate training to facilitators/hosts, payments, operations, communication and customer support through a single online portal developed in-house, while still providing network-building experiences offline to locals, migrants and refugees. This model ensures a greater efficiency and it allows the project to scale and be replicated by a social franchising model. Last year, SPEAK launched a program called Take SPEAK to Your City which makes it very easy to start a new SPEAK chapter. The team trains anyone willing to set up SPEAK in their city, so that they can help it become more inclusive and at the same time create their own job. The training includes sales, partnerships, operations, local marketing, and tailored ongoing support.

Most initiatives trying to tackle this problem limit their impact by not looking at all the causes behind it, resulting in incomplete interventions, such as formal language courses, tackling the language barrier but ignoring the fact that the imposition of the course and its rigidity directly contribute to an increased feeling of not belonging. 

SPEAK, on the other hand, is a community-based solution, offering a language and culture exchange program as a means to bring newcomers and locals together, both participating actively in the solution. SPEAK’s approach:

1) Places migrants and refugees as bridge builders and ambassadors for cultural dialogue in their communities, empowering newcomers to take action, as they are not only guests or receivers anymore;

2) Provides an informal support network to newcomers upon their arrival, helping breaking up the systemic vicious circle of isolation;

3) Mitigates cultural stigma by demonstrating the richness of multiculturalism to local communities in practice.

Rather than language learning, SPEAK measures meaningful relationships and what they represent. SPEAK breaks down the isolation barrier in 12 weeks.

An additional innovation at SPEAK is its Online2Offline model: applications and payments take place online, while the learning and sharing experience is offline, in the real world. This model makes for the most efficient use of resources and is geared toward growth, helping to keep scale and efficiency as priorities and making it easier to launch SPEAK in new cities. In a way, this model is allowing SPEAK to empower communities at scale.

SPEAK is a crowdsourced language and culture exchange network, based on an Online2Offline (O2O) model. All processes are managed online, through a platform developed in-house, while the learning and sharing experience happens offline.

Hence, our technology allows scalability without compromising the real world connections. On our web platform, the community:

• Enrolls in language groups - including the payment or the scholarship application.
• Creates events.

• Communicates in discussion groups related to their language groups, events, or other.

• Shares language learning materials, provided by the platform.

• Shares tips related to language learning or other.

• Attends online workshops to become buddies (to help others learn).

On the backoffice side, our platform works as a SaaS, allowing founders to:

• Manage operations - applications, language groups’ management, room partners.

• Manage financials - account balance, request payment, upload invoice, and visualize historic data.

This model gives us flexibility to define which processes are guaranteed by the central team and which are decentralized to founders. It also makes the process of opening and managing  SPEAK in a city very easy.

The fact that the team withdraws itself from the stage and presents SPEAK as a language learning meetup and event launching platform makes its users take ownership of the resulting culture/language sharing communities. By doing this, SPEAK is empowering newcomers themselves to be the protagonists in the creation of their own informal support networks and in their integration process at large.

The social exclusion of migrants and refugees is a multidimensional problem that requires a scrutinized analysis of its causes, including the language barrier, discrimination, and the lack of a support networks. 

SPEAK’s theory of change is based on the field-tested hypothesis that the creation of opportunities for locals and migrants to meet with a common objective, and in an informal environment, in which cultures are shared and appreciated, is one of the most powerful tools to foster greater social inclusion. 

SPEAK brings this together in its activities - language groups and community-organized events.

On the short term, the participation in SPEAK activities contribute to the acquisition of the language, the creation of a support network and the increased knowledge about different cultures. On the medium term, these changes lead to a higher sense of belonging to the community and the valorization of the migrant community. Ultimately, these contribute to our long term goal: the social inclusion of migrants and refugees. 

SPEAK measures its impact on the community through surveys sent to users who participated in at least 1 language group. Our impact assessment report shows that, by the end of 12th week of participation in SPEAK’s language groups and events, the participants’ sense of belonging in the host community has already increased by 15% and that language is 30% less of a barrier in their integration process. Furthermore, 73% of newcomers made friends through SPEAK, with72% meeting their friends at least once a month outside of SPEAK activities.

SPEAK is now a community of over 20.000 people from 160 different nationalities who are spread over 21 cities in Europe. In Portugal, the government is now using SPEAK as the mainstream solution to integrate refugees. So far, our community has completed more than 900 language groups and organized over 500 events. In 2018 alone, SPEAK impacted 7,244 people, and in 2019 we plan to double it.

Our social franchising model is boosting growth. In 2019, SPEAK almost doubled the number of cities where it is present, going from 12 to 21 in 7 months.

SPEAK wants to be in 40 cities by 2020 and the current growth rate gives us confidence that this is a realistic goal. Considering the existing SPEAK communities, this geographic reach means a global network of 30,000 people impacted yearly. In 5 years, SPEAK will be in 100 cities, reaching 80,000 people yearly.

SPEAK’s model has proven to help newcomers feel integrated in their new community. The next challenge is exponential scalability and effectiveness increase.  

In the next 12 months:

We want to make our social franchising model more efficient, improving performance on a city-level and attracting more founders. Our web platform has a large potential for efficiency gains regarding support and training to founders -- the goal is to improve it as a Software as a Service. 

This program is also an opportunity to create jobs for refugees and we should develop its full potential. We are planning to implement a capacity-building program, with the aim of allowing refugees to dedicate full-time to starting SPEAK in their cities while receiving support from an expert. We have also been looking into the need of developing a mobile app to increase user engagement through push notifications in a strategic and non-intrusive way.

In the next 5 years:

To improve the effectiveness of SPEAK we will include mobile sensing and a specific type of affective computing - systems that detect the emotions of the user. With sensors present on smartphones and information on the online properties of SPEAK, the system will automatically infer if the participant is lonely, has an informal network and other information relevant to act on. This will allow automatic suggestions of different actions, such as participating in certain events, organizing an event about the participant’s culture, and contacting someone from the participant’s country of origin who is more integrated in the community.

For the next year:

1. Founder profile - SPEAK’s scaling strategy is based on a social franchising model, meaning it largely depends on the success of our founders. The ‘take SPEAK to your city’ program was launched last year and now there are 15 cities running on this model. The right profile of a SPEAK Founder is an ongoing challenge. 
2. Monetization - Another challenge we are facing is monetization. Scaling will largely contribute to the sustainability of the project but until we reach significant scale, we are also concerned about monetizing our solution. We are looking for new revenue streams while at the same time trying to optimize the current ones, always making sure they are aligned with social impact. Having a clear way to become self-sustainable on a city level is important for the founders and it will unlock scalability and impact.

For the next 5 years:

1. Product development - In order to offer an excellent user experience, SPEAK needs to offer a simple and user-friendly platform that is ready to be replicated in new cities and adapted to the participants’ needs.
2. Quality control - When projects scale, it is a challenge to maintain the sense of community and care, as well as the level of engagement of the community.

1. Founder profile - the lack of experience led us to adopt the strategy of starting with a very diverse group of first founders. Time will help us understand who is the type of person who is more likely to be a top performer. Until then, we have been trying to narrow down our target audience to social entrepreneurs and/or enthusiasts. We believe that these are good indicators of combining the right set of skills with alignment with SPEAK’s mission. For instance, we are preparing a MOOC about social franchising, that will reach people from around the world who are interested in social impact but did not know about the ‘take SPEAK to your city’ program. We will also ask potential founders to go through the course and understand if they have the profile and are willing to accept the challenge of starting something on their own.
2. Monetization - we have been considering different ways of allowing participants who can pay more than the established fee to do it. In addition, there is also a significant market opportunity for B2B and B2G sales that we are not totally approaching.
3. Product development - to overcome this challenge, SPEAK will keep investing in the technology, and collect feedback from the community and from the entrepreneurs who are bringing SPEAK to their cities.
4. Quality control - to avoid this problem, SPEAK hired a person dedicated exclusively to Community Management and Quality Control, which will focus on developing processes focused on these two areas.

While formally constituted as a for-profit entity, Share Your World is a social tech startup with 100% of its activity being impact-oriented and with no dividend distribution – profits, after the initial private investment is paid back with a fixed return rate of 7% in a buyout transaction, will always be reinvested in Share Your World’s activity in order to scale impact.

The team has 10 full-time staff and 3 part-time interns.

Hugo Menino Aguiar, co-founder of SPEAK and CEO, was a Software Engineer at OutSystems and a Product Manager at Google, where he was awarded a Google Golden Award. Hugo left Google to create SPEAK. He is also a Global Shaper at the World Economic Forum and an Ashoka Fellow since 2018.

Mariana Brilhante, co-founder of SPEAK and CMO. Before SPEAK, Mariana worked at IES-SBS developing and implementing social innovation strategies for several companies. Previously, Mariana worked as a Project Director for Oxford Business Group producing investment guides in 4 continents (14 countries) where she was in charge of business development and managing the team. Mariana has an MBA from Nova-Catolica University, she is a mentor at Yunus Social Business and co-founded The Lisbon MBA Entrepreneurship Club.

Pedro Tunes, COO of SPEAK, was the Operations Manager of IES-SBS powered by INSEAD and the Executive Director of AHEAD, where he managed educational programs that reached over 2000 people yearly. He holds MSc in Social Policy and Development from LSE and in Management from Nova SBE

Rita Brito e Faro, Financial Controller & People Ops of SPEAK. Before joining SPEAK, she worked at Oxy Capital managing investment funds portfolio accounts. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics and a Master in Management from Nova SBE.

The rest of the team complements the needs of the project with skills ranging from content creation, customer support, and product development.

• The Portuguese government, through ACM - the High Commissioner for Migrations, uses SPEAK as the mainstream solution to integrate migrants and refugees. This is a fundamental partner to reach the people who need SPEAK the most.
• Hugo was nominated Ashoka Fellow in February 2019. Ashoka has been sharing contacts from their network in Europe, namely Spain, Italy, and Belgium. This has been particularly important to unlock scaling opportunities.

• Erasmus Student Network (ESN) is a very recent but key partnership for SPEAK. ESN Coimbra is starting SPEAK in the social franchising model.

• At the operations level, SPEAK has communication and room partners. 

  • The first helps communicating SPEAK and the buddy program to its target audience (migrants, refugees, foreign students, locals). Some examples are migrant associations, parish councils, embassies, companies, and universities. These organizations find in SPEAK the integration solution for their own beneficiaries, employees or students.

  • Room partners are organizations with underutilized spaces and interested in having new people and activities like language groups and events in their facilities. These can be, for instance, libraries, bars, or cultural associations.

SPEAK offers 2 core activities to its end-user: language groups and community-organized events. 

In the language groups, during the 12 weeks, participants get together to learn a new language with the help of two buddies. The operations team facilitates online workshops, and prepares support materials to help buddies prepare the sessions. SPEAK offers not only a language learning experience, but an opportunity to meet new people, for a symbolic fee of 29 euros. Nevertheless, participants who cannot afford it have free access to SPEAK.

Sales include not only B2C, but also B2B and B2G. SPEAK sells these subscriptions to companies and foundations that pay for their employees who are migrants or refugees, and partners with City Halls that pay for a number of people who can participate and are not able to pay.

Community-organized events are prepared by ambassadors, with the help of buddies and participants and are for free. The community gets together once a month for all kinds of events, like picnics, treasure hunts, or international dinners.

We also offer full access to our technology, as well as cross-sectorial training, to anyone willing to set up SPEAK so that they can help their city become more inclusive and at the same time create their own job. All revenues that come from our franchisees are variable, so that there are no upfront costs on their side.

We want to raise an investment round to continue developing our product and, boosting growth through our social franchise model. Funding will be used to recruit key team members, develop our  product technology, and support the growth of the social franchise cities. We are currently in conversations with a few interested investors.

In the longer term, our business plan predicts that we will be cash flow positive once we reach 100 cities, which should be by 2024. Thanks to our Online2Offline model, which uses technology to scale operations and crowdsources spaces, SPEAK's revenues increase at a much higher rate than its cost structure, which will allow SPEAK to be sustainable at scale. SPEAK's business model relies on two main sources of revenue:

1. Fees paid by participants enrolled in language groups. The fee is 29 euros for a 3-month language group but participants that cannot pay are given a 100% scholarship.

2. Fees paid by entrepreneurs who want to open SPEAK in their cities - this works as a SaaS / franchise model . The variable fee on applications revenues is 25%, on B2B, donations, and awards is 15% and in B2G is 5%. There is also a fee on fundraising, 50% on the first 10.000 euros raised and 5% on the remaining amount.

Solve can help SPEAK communicate the ‘take SPEAK to your city’ program to the right audience, and that would tackle our first barrier which is finding the right founder. The first step of taking SPEAK to a new city is getting to know individuals and organizations that are aligned with SPEAK’s mission and that would be willing to make it their own. Simply joining the MIT-backed network can unlock very significant scaling opportunities, not only by getting validation on impact and business model from experts, but by actually meeting potential SPEAK founders from around the globe. Furthermore, business development advisory would help us refine our international expansion strategy in the scope of the social franchising model, so as to maximize the creation of jobs and impact on the city level.

• The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) would be an important partner in the validation of SPEAK’s methodology, as well as in the worldwide adoption and implementation of the product.
• WeWork provides shared workspaces for technology startup subculture communities. SPEAK could benefit from mentoring on how to grow a O2O business, and the WeWork network could be an international room partner, providing easy access to language groups to their residents. This company also acts on the integration of refugees through employability, and the ‘take SPEAK to your city program’ might be an answer to many of the refugees WeWork works with.
• Microsoft, Google, or IBM are the ideal mentors SPEAK would like to have when developing AI as a service
• Duolingo can complement its language learning service with the offline experience, while SPEAK gains exposure and user adoption.

We would use the AI Innovations Prize to increase the success rate of breaking down the risk of social isolation. To improve the effectiveness of SPEAK we will include mobile sensing and a specific type of affective computing - systems that detect the emotions of the user. With sensors present on smartphones and information on the online properties of SPEAK, the system will collect relevant data to automatically infer if the participant is stressed, lonely, has an informal network and other information relevant to act on, allowing for automatic suggestions of different actions along time. Simple examples of features that will empower what SPEAK is already implementing include:

• Identifying participants who feel lonely or sad, and suggest that they participate in specific events that have the probability of improving their emotional state and allowing them to connect with other people.

• Identifying participants who are not attending events, and suggest and train them on how to create an event about their culture or language and open it to other people

• Identifying recently arrived participants, and suggest that they connect with someone of their original country that is more experienced in the city, and suggest questions and topics to discuss with that person. The system will also do the same suggestion to the experienced participant to maximise the probability of a connection between the two. Moreover, the system will do the same exercise with a local that has been in contact with people from the country of origin of the newcomer.

SPEAK is in 21 cities in 7 different countries - Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom - and has already impacted more than 20K people representing 160 nationalities. This year we are growing at a 100% growth rate. With the program ‘take SPEAK to your city’, anyone can start SPEAK in the city where they are living, giving us the opportunity to reach more people and transform more lives. SPEAK’s mission is close to the heart of many people, including migrants and refugees, who have the passion and the desire to start SPEAK. The Prize for Innovation in Refugee Inclusion would help refugees begin their journey as entrepreneurs. This would allow SPEAK to be present in the cities where it’s needed and at the same time create jobs and empower the community. Funding would be used for stipends and capacity-building programs. These would equip entrepreneurs with the right set of skills to implement SPEAK, becoming inspiring mobilizers and helping their cities become more inclusive.

We would use the Innospark Ventures Prize to increase the success rate of breaking down the risk of social isolation. To improve the effectiveness of SPEAK we will include mobile sensing and a specific type of affective computing - systems that detect the emotions of the user. With sensors present on smartphones and information on the online properties of SPEAK, the system will collect relevant data to automatically infer if the participant is stressed, lonely, has an informal network and other information relevant to act on, allowing for automatic suggestions of different actions along time. Simple examples of features that will empower what SPEAK is already implementing include:

• Identifying participants who feel lonely or sad, and suggest that they participate in specific events that have the probability of improving their emotional state and allowing them to connect with other people.

• Identifying participants who are not attending events, and suggest and train them on how to create an event about their culture or language and open it to other people

• Identifying recently arrived participants, and suggest that they connect with someone of their original country that is more experienced in the city, and suggest questions and topics to discuss with that person. The system will also do the same suggestion to the experienced participant to maximise the probability of a connection between the two. Moreover, the system will do the same exercise with a local that has been in contact with people from the country of origin of the newcomer. 

SPEAK is in 21 cities in 7 different countries - Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom - and has already impacted more than 20K people representing 160 nationalities. This year we are growing at a 100% growth rate. With the program ‘take SPEAK to your city’, anyone can start SPEAK in the city where they are living, giving us the opportunity to reach more people and transform more lives. SPEAK’s mission is close to the heart of many people, including migrants and refugees, who have the passion and the desire to start SPEAK. The Morgridge Family Foundation Community-Driven Innovation Prize would help refugees begin their journey as entrepreneurs. This would allow SPEAK to be present in the cities where it’s needed and at the same time create jobs and empower the community. Funding would be used for stipends and capacity-building programs. These would equip entrepreneurs with the right set of skills to implement SPEAK, becoming inspiring mobilizers and helping their cities become more inclusive.