Follow our journey
Would you like to know how this project born? You can read our story here: our first steps and ideas, how this project started, our failures - but what we learnt from them... So please be our guest...
Part 1 — Brainstorming and first ideas
When we first started this journey, we decided to make an impact to two sustainable development goals. First one was number four (quality education) and second one was number 10 (reduce inequalities).
We started to make brainstorming with post-its. We considered many point of views (goverment, money, cultures etc.) through brainstorming and ended up thinking about for example how hard is it to learn if you don’t speak the language. That’s why we decided that we wanted to explore more how refugees/immigrants are educated in Greece and in Athens and what challenges they face and can we do something to conquer those challenges.
After brainstorming we decided to focus more on this specific challenge. We made more detailed map what challenges we are facing and what do we already know about this subject. We asked question “What if the access to education is much more challenging than we can imagine?”. Then we defined that we want to help refugees, volunteers and non government organizations. by helping the process in some level (teaching Greek to refugees, helping with paperwork etc.).
Finally we defined and visualized the challenge and asked “ What might we do to connect the two sides and build the bridge?”. For doing that we need to meet refugees and people who work with them to find out which are the main challenges in this field and what can we do to help them.
Part 2 — First contacts
To really understand feelings and life as an refugee we knew that we needed to meet them. Empathy is even more important when you don’t know a lot of the challenges the people are facing. That’s why this step was very important to our team. We also knew that to understand the whole “puzzle” we needed to meet volunteers, the representatives of organisations, ex-refugees and common people.
We made questions for refugees, volunteers and representatives of organization -->
After that we searched though the internet to find shelters contact information in Athens. We contacted Red Cross, Greek council for refugees, Caritas Athens, Orange house and Melissa network. We had also couple of Erasmus friends who were working as an volunteers in Athens so we decided to contact them too. The plan was to get 3–5 interviews.
In this stage we faced the biggest difficulty during our journey. Organizations weren’t responding to us or if they did the answer was strict no. Luckily we were able to interview one of the Erasmus girls who was volunteering in Athens. She worked in one refugee shelter and promised us to take two of her volunteering friends with her when we would meet.
This changed our way of thinking and we decided to focus on more volunteers and their needs. We weren’t allowed to meet refugees and representatives of organizations so this made us think that the community is really closed and they don’t want us to find out possible challenges and help them solve them. Our next step will be to interview these volunteers and empathy their experiences in volunteering.
Part 3 — Empathy
After failing while trying to contact refuge shelters we decided to focus on volunteers. We had already volunteers who were willing to be interviewed but we also wanted to ask from common people what they think about volunteering.
One of the first piece of our research was gathering data from our friends and schoolmates. We asked them what people understand a refugee to be if they had ever interacted with a refugee and whether or not they had volunteered to help refugees. And our third question was whether they ever visited a website that would focus on helping refugees. For this graph, we got an answer from 64 people in our surroundings.
For this graph, we got an answer from 64 people in our surroundings. As you can see, many of our respondents already met with the refugee. And more than half of them volunteered to helped them, whether it was financial or material help. However, only 13 of them have ever visited a website that focuses on volunteer help to refugees.
After this research, we interviewed more closely 3 volunteers at the beginning of December. They all are currently working with refugees in Athens. This is what we asked -->
The responses were quite positive and it can tell that they really want to help other people. The only negative thing they told was that volunteers aren’t having a lot of support or education for volunteering. Volunteers were afraid that if something unexpected happens while volunteering they don’t know how to act. They were also worried that it is quite hard to find support or peer support for volunteering. It is important to have an opportunity to share thoughts and feelings with other volunteers. Besides support inside the country was an issue, volunteers also said that volunteering and becoming a volunteer is especially hard when you try to go to another country. For us, this support thing the volunteers were talking about was something we got our eyes on.
For us, this support thing the volunteers were talking about was something we got our eyes on. Can we, for example, make a platform which is giving information and support to volunteers all over Europe or even all over the world?
Part 4 — User experience map
Let’s say we want to make an internet platform (web page or something) for volunteers where they can share information, get some education and meet other volunteers from their own country and also from other countries. While trying to prototype this web page we need to remember who is it for. For this reason we made a user experience map which shows the ideal users of our platform.
Our user map has two different kind of volunteers. There is Anna who wants to become a volunteer and then there is David who is already volunteering but wants to help other volunteers. Below you can read their stories how they are going to find our platform and how they are going to use it.
This user experience map will help us when we start to design the actual web page for volunteers.
Part 5 — The website
After our fail with refugees centers, we changed our perspective. Beyond that, we also had to think over our Sustainable Development goals, because it was number four (quality education) and the second one was number 10 (reduce inequalities). However, we needed to change this after that we could not really get in touch with the refugee centers. So we determine to focus more on number four, and turned to volunteers.
As we had first-hand experiences about how hard it is to be (or trying to be) a volunteer, we decided to create a website, where people can find everything they need. In this we would posted personal stories of refugees, collect the organizations who work with them, and also a bunch of applications, where want-to-be-volunteers could learn the basic of different languages. This way — with the basic knowledge of the refugee’s native language — would be a little bit easier to help them.
We would also have a contact platform — but a very simple. People, who have questions, send us an email, and after we receive it, we answer them in little “blog posts” on the website — of course be observant of the person’s personality.
After we created the basic of the website, we move on to the next step, so we will ask prospect users: volunteers; ones, who want to be one; and a few random people in the street to ask for their opinion.
Part 6— Testing
After a very important step as prototyping and making a users’ map we started to build up step by step our web-site. We were mostly concentrated on the idea that this web-page should help people to become volunteers and also should show to random visitors that refugees/ immigrants are beside us and they need our help. So that’s why it must be done that way that it could be easy to navigate on it.
When it was done, we had to test it to see if it will work in real life and if it will be usefull for people around us. For greeks as well as for foreigners. So we needed to get some feedback about it to improve it. Because feedback is one of the most important steps on the way to a good project. For this we decided to talk with people whom we can divide on 3 groups: 1) Erasmus students; 2) Greek students- volunteers; 3) Young people in the street.
We interwied 18 people who already do volonteering or who want to become a such. They were nearly all agree on the fact that the idea itself is good. But we also get some critical comments about the project which is also good. The conversation with people had 3 steps: 1) Presenting the idea in general; 2) Showing the web-site and Instagram page; 3) 3 main questions. Here you can see some of the feedbacks that we got.
Part 7 — The website 2.0
After the interviews, we had positive and negative feedback also, so we started to develop our idea, and used the negative feedback to make our website better for the volunteers. First of all, because one of our interviewee told us that our website is not enough interactive, neither attractive — we totally changed the design of it. It was very important, because the template, that we used, could not allow us to make it eye catching, or in general: to improve it the way we wanted to.
So, as we realized this, we searched and find “Wix”. Here we had the chance to find everything we wanted to, even things that we thought is impossible (for example the chat function). As we were developing Bridge it! to make it more attractive, interactive and enjoyable, we did not want to lose sight of to keep it clear and easy to use. Our main goal in this website to connect the people and that our Bridge it! to be like an info bank for volunteers. Down below, I describe how it build up.
As a basic for a website, of course, we have a little introduction about ourselves and about why we do this, but to focus on the more important sites: we have a little site about refugees: here we posted videos, in which they tell their personal stories. This is made to empathize with them, and to understand better their life.
One of our interviewee told us, that it would be very useful to have a platform about the refugee’s culture — we did not think about it before, so we was really happy and grateful for this idea and we created a site for this. Unfortunately we could not finish this, but it is really an important thing to do.
We knew it from the really beginning of our work, that language is the gap between refugees and education — or we could even say, not only for education, but for their life. It is hard to do your everyday schedule if you can not speak the language, and it is the same in the other hand. Even if you would like to help, but you can not understand the other person, it is a hard thing to do. So, to give the chance to make it a little bit easier, we collected a few applications, in which volunteers can learn the basics of different languages.
We could not let go fully our first idea with the organizations, so we started to collect those organizations who work with refugees in Athens. Our list is very in embryo — to make it really good and real, we need to get in touch with the organizations (what we could not reach this far). It is also a feedback from one of our contacts, that we should separate the organizations on the basis of which of them accept new volunteers (even without volunteering experience).
However, maybe one of, the most important thing is on our website the live chat and the contact platform. Interested people can write us emails, and in the live chat basically everybody can answer to the questions (we, ex- or actual volunteers, or other ones who already found the solution). This is probably the most exceptional change, compare to our old website, because like this everybody can help the other — like a community.
Our aim in Bridge it! to create the website, that is a guide for volunteers, where they can find everything what they need — in one place.
We also created an Instagram site. We mostly use it to introduce ourselves and to show our work (for example in Instagram stories we showed how we created the website). It is also a platform where volunteers (or future volunteers) can contact us; and we would like to extend this with sharing volunteer’s stories.
Part 8 — What we’ve learnt?
What we’ve learnt out of this project? The very first “lesson” for us was that our fail with the first idea wasn’t a bad thing. Thankfully to it we were led to the side of the project which is more interesting and could be more useful. We realized that may be we can do even more if we will help volunteers, because by this way we can reach more people and more people can help more refugees, so basically we can have a bigger impact. Our failure taught us how important are the contacts.
When we started from the beginning after a failure it wasn’t very easy for us to find people who can help us, but with time, we found them. Although sometimes it was uneasy to get useful information from our prototype users for the improvements.
What did we reach after all? We created a web-site and an Instagram profile. This time that we had wasn't enough to make a big change in this field, but we believe that our work and our tiny change will grow and will have a bigger impact in the future. We could say that for the moment the main impact is that we connected a few volunteers with each other an who knows? - maybe they will be the initial stage of “Bridge It” volunteering group.
So, what would be the next steps? First of all, we should search for more people and build the community of “Bridge It”. We also have an idea to make a “mentor program” in which ex or actual volunteers would be a “helping hand” to the new ones, in order to bring them into this world of volunteering. We are planning to organize some events where interested people could get every information that they need in person. After all, with time we would like to collaborate with other organisations to be more effective and to be to help more.
