Abstract
Johann Daniel Harnoss on one group’s strategy to facilitate global migration, one person at a time.
Mahmoud is a 29-year-old computer engineer from Cairo, Egypt. For five years, he wanted nothing more than go to Europe to work and live with his friends. After applying, unsuccessfully, to more than 250 companies he turned to my team at Imagine Foundation. Less than 6 weeks later, Mahmoud landed a job in Berlin, Germany. And we’ve never met.
I am a trained economist, educator, and strategy consultant. I like my work, yet yearned for a bigger purpose. I found it when I stumbled across a staggering fact reported by Branko Milanovic in an economics journal in 2015: nearly two-thirds of all economic differences between two randomly chosen people in the world are due to just one factor: Their place of birth.
From a global justice perspective, this seemed grossly unfair. With a group of 15 volunteer friends from 10 countries, I founded Imagine Foundation. To us, facilitating global migration is the most straightforward way to extend opportunity for all. Thus, we have become one of the first NGOs in Germany to build an online school and job matching system that helps smooth the way for people like Mahmoud and their families to migrate in a simple, safe, and legal manner. Specifically, we work to secure mentors for and employers ready to sponsor skilled software engineers from Egypt, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
By luck and by design, we found an approach that led us from ideas to impact quite quickly.
We pair aspiring migrants with online mentors and a rigorous study program focused on building communication skills, technical abilities, and self-marketing skills. In our first six months, we received more than 1,500 applications, worked with over 800 students, and directly helped 10 people and their families migrate to Europe.
Imagine Foundation has also been able to build, validate, and refine our model at a speed that is unusual for a volunteer organization with a shoestring budget. We are proof that positive action is possible even when it comes to a highly politicized issue like global migration. Three simple principles have guided the way: put humans first, technology second; get to scale, avoid the baggage; and allow for radical autonomy.
We put humans first by orienting all our efforts around the people we serve. With a lightweight digital interface that streamlines administrative coordination, communication, and document generation, our volunteers can spend close to 100% of their time working with their mentees. This isn’t fancy tech, and our website isn’t the prettiest. But our technology stack works, it’s cheap, and it’s flexible. Three months ago, we changed our entire curriculum in less than three days’ work. And students love it. It is also the result of being attentive to our migrants’ needs: had we listened to German experts, we would have built a solution to help with administrative hurdles in the visa process. Instead, we listened to our audience and heard that getting the visa was nowhere near as critical as getting a job offer. So we focused on that.
To have large-scale impact, we knew we needed a scalable model in which extra output doesn’t require significant extra volunteer time or financial input. So we always ask: How does this help us scale while not taking on additional baggage? Example: To attract students, many established organizations typically look for local partners. We did not. We instead relied on social media and referrals for recruitment, which also meant avoiding the politics and coordination involved in local institutional partnerships. Yet we also purposefully do critical work that does not scale. We once spent two full days improving a student’s CV and online presence. Three months later, the student had a job and now happily lives in Europe. But we did not stop there. Now, we’ve automated parts of this service so that, today, our CV and Linkedin feedback takes a well-trained volunteer less than 10 minutes.
Scalability requires new forms of team management. Thus, we adopted our third principle: radical autonomy. Traditional organizations rely on hierarchies to allocate and quality check tasks, and to build relationships among staff. At Imagine, automation obviates the need for such transactional work relationships and frees up volunteers so that, after a targeted initial training, they can run their coaching independently while learning from each other in peer-to-peer exchanges. It might be risky, but this level of trust brings out the best in our mentors. They communicate via daily banter in our whatsapp group and enjoy the direct emotional reinforcement received from working directly with their mentees. Some of our most active volunteers see each other as rarely as once a month. We even have a mentor we all haven’t yet met in person.
Admittedly, some of our ways of working are idiosyncratic to our unique mission and team. Yet mission and team are choices: social change-makers have the agency to choose where and how to find leverage. If applied right, we can bring vigorous, positive action into the world. And through this action, we can change people’s hearts and minds.
For now, I’m heading off to meet Mahmoud in a human-first, but clearly non-scalable and non-autonomous way: in real life, in person, at the airport.
