Happy Sunday!
Welcome back to Founders Feature, a weekly newsletter all about the journeys of young startup founders.
For this week's edition, I interviewed Tiara Sahar Ataii, Founder of SolidariTee, the UK's largest student-run charity.
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Here’s what SolidariTee is all about:
🏠 The Basics
The Problem:
What people tend to understand as the refugee crisis is that refugees are coming in masses. The refugee crisis in the way I see it is not this, it is a crisis of compassion, with lacking understanding from the population and adequate policies.
The Solution:
The solution to the above problem is essentially trying to encourage a more compassionate and responsible stance towards forced displacement.
SolidariTee is a student-run charity with three aims: Number one, we are funding long-term and sustainable aid in the refugee crisis. Number two, we're empowering students to make a change. And number three, we are raising awareness of the refugee crisis.
By raising awareness, we're trying to create a more compassionate culture towards refugees because we recognise that none of this would have ever happened had there been a more compassionate and responsible stance towards refugees in the first place. By empowering students, we're trying to broaden the pool of people who are able to make a social impact and feel like they have a stake in the crisis.
The funds we raise go to charities and NGOs who are primarily offering Legal Aid. We believe it is much more impactful to fund people who have the expertise and the knowledge and qualifications to do this work than to send out people to volunteer who may not have the skills.
The Team:
We have a team in now over 60 universities in the UK, with around 800 students. In each university, there are teams of reps, managed by head reps, which are then again managed by a central team. Personally, I am now the Chair of the Board of Trustees with a more monitoring, capacity building, and strategic role. We pass leadership down to new students, which is something I really like about SolidariTee: Every year new people keep joining.
🚀 The Journey
How did you come up with your startup/solution?
As an Iranian, I speak Farsi, and I had done a lot of interpretation work when I was a first-year at Cambridge. I would go to countries like Greece to volunteer in refugee camps and I was expecting the material conditions to be bad. And in Greece, they really were appalling. But I guess what I hadn't really anticipated was that people could put up with the material conditions, to a certain extent, but what they couldn't deal with was the constant legal limbo they were put in. There were just so many cases where people were being rejected, or denied asylum, for the most ludicrous of reasons that a lawyer could have ironed out quickly. And I find it very disturbing that as a 19-year-old, just trying to volunteer wherever I could, I kept getting pulled into interpreting for people and their meetings with their lawyers. I'm not a qualified interpreter and it was just so shocking to me that I was their best option.
So, I went back to Cambridge thinking, I want to spread awareness of this because no asylum seeker can vote to change the asylum system. Only citizens - ironically - can hold the government to account here. But I also wanted to make sure that people have lawyers such that in the meantime, at least, they can receive legal aid, and get asylum, albeit in a very undignified and exhausting way.
I also wanted to do something that would create a community, something that would put people in the same room talking about the same things. So I thought, what if we had a kind of community fundraising model where students could get involved and manage other students and have teams who support each other. And that's how I came up with the idea of shirts, which people would sell, it would be a kind of silent protest. And so I bought 600 shirts out of my student loan, which gave me a good impetus to sell them, and they really just flew off the shelves. And I think it was a time when people really cared and felt like they would really go out of their way to do something.
Why is this the right time for this problem to be solved?
The refugee crisis, to an extent, is really about us here. Refugees and asylum seekers will continue to make perilous journeys, because they don't have any other choice, frankly. And the onus is on us to therefore find a compassionate and responsible solution to it. Instead, we have just been pushing individuals and societies towards the demonisation of refugees. So, part of the reason we're so keen on empowering students is that they will influence the culture of the next generations.
When we launched, I think it was the right time in the UK because people were beginning to understand the extent of the crisis more through Calais. Previously, people saw the refugee crisis as something very distant that didn't really concern the UK partly just through an accident of fate and geography, in that we're an island.
What is a recent success you are proud of?
I've been really happy to see that rep satisfaction is much higher in the newer teams, and I think reps feel like they're learning a lot through the process. This wasn't always the case because I was not an experienced manager at all. I didn't know how to give feedback, or how to create management structures. Hearing now that reps say they've learned a lot and really feel confident in being advocates for the refugee crisis is something I'm very proud of.
What is a recent challenge you have faced?
Something I continually find difficult is to really measure impact. SolidariTee hasn't been around long enough to really know to what extent people really take what they did at SolidariTee into the future. So what I would love to do at some point is a survey about SolidariTee outcomes asking questions like: Have you volunteered this year? What do you do now? To what extent do you think that was impacted by SolidariTee? I spent quite a lot of time thinking about, to what extent we are actually making a change.
What do you wish you knew before you started and is there anything you would have done differently in hindsight?
In hindsight, I would definitely have done some management training earlier on. I had no idea what I was doing. And looking back, there was a lot of stuff I didn't know how to do. And it was okay, not knowing certain things like how to run a fundraising campaign. But what wasn't okay was I didn't know how to get the best of the people I had on my team who were experts in this. So, I wish I had at least bought myself some books on management issues, which I then did like two years later.
🧠 The Lessons
What is the best advice you have been given recently?
I think a lot of people like to project their experiences through advice, as a way of convincing themselves that they've done the right thing. So I always feel a little awkward giving advice. And I feel very awkward receiving it.
But what I always found really helpful looking at other startups and other founders, was that the founders who seem to have the happiest teams who don't only live for their work are the most successful startups and the ones that seem to be having the most fun.
Similarly, the ones where the founders maintain a social life and work-life balance are also those with a really successful, growing team. It's important to remember that your company might exist because of you, but you don't exist only for it.
What advice would you give to other young founders?
Speaking mainly for the social impact entrepreneurship space, I would keep reminding you to question if you really know what your targeted community has in mind.
With charity and social impact, it's easy to spend a lot of time thinking about how you'll be received, and very little time thinking about whether the product you're creating is actually at all wanted or needed. And a lot of the time we get away with that in charity, because it's like, oh, we're just trying to do something good.
If you don't hold yourself accountable for this, you might be taking away space from initiatives that are actually contributing positively. Talking to the people you're trying to help is often the best way to help them, because they usually know what they want and how to get it, but we assume that they don't.
What is the biggest lesson you have learned so far?
The biggest lesson I've learned is to remain humble. I think a lot of stuff in the entrepreneurship space is noise that doesn't really benefit the targeted community. But it creates an economy of people giving talks & speeches, people writing articles, and it creates a sense of hustle and engagement and success. But if you're not measuring success by the metrics of community, then it's noise and not necessarily substance. Keep going back to the roots and don't forget why you started. Focusing on the mission you've set out to do will likely bring much greater fulfilment and success.
✨ The Inspiration
Who inspires you?
I find things about lots of different people very inspirational. I think integrity is a really undervalued quality right now in society. And I think a lot of people get away with not having very much integrity in our society.
So, for example, in the SolidariTee team, there are a lot of people who actually live by their morals, and a lot of people who put an incredible amount of time and passion into something that ultimately is not paid, and will not ever guarantee them a job. We have 800 people who are putting in time free of charge on top of their studies during a pandemic, to show that they care, and I find that really inspiring.
What book do you think everyone should read?
Extreme Economies - Richard Davies
No Such Thing as a Free Gift - Linsey McGoey
Bullshit jobs - David Graeber