Could a board game change the world? If it helps players change their minds about the people and the world around them, then Tugba, a 2019 GATHER Fellow from Turkey, is already seeing the results.

Through her company, Learning Designs, she’s created over 60 games and training sessions that introduce skills, ideas, and lessons on everything from teamwork to children’s rights, intercultural learning, youth entrepreneurship, and active citizenship.

Surprisingly, Tugba didn’t play many board games growing up—she said it just wasn’t part of the culture in Turkey—but she did have a playful grandmother who taught her games from her own childhood. Even through a Skype call over an ocean, that ebullient nature shone through in Tugba: She’s quick to laugh, open hearted, and eager to connect.

Building relationships, along with a desire to make an impact, are, after all, what inspired her youthful aspirations of one day becoming mayor. And though she’s not working in government institutions today, in reality, she’s doing exactly what she always wanted to do: make a difference.

“We are creating many different games and trainings that touch people: refugees, young people, and adults,” she said. “I wanted to be mayor because I wanted to change my region and my city, but now I’m doing it for my country and even on an international scale.”

The games, which are often tailor made working with schools, businesses, and nonprofits who focus on a specific need—such as social inclusion for refugees—have been played by thousands of people in Europe and Latin America, but she applied to the GATHER Fellowship looking to further develop a project that’s based around an issue that hits close to home for Tugba: gender equality.

“Turkey ranks 130th (out of 149 countries) in gender equality,” Tugba said, citing a 2018 report by the World Economic Forum. “To overcome this problem, we have to change points of view and make gender issues a point for people to talk about.”

As a female business owner, it’s a topic rooted in personal experiences—when she started her company, she said that even her family still wondered if she could really pull it off, solely because of her gender. It’s these sort of societal barriers, the kind that would give even a supportive family pause or keep a young girl from reaching her full potential, that drive Tugba to change traditional mindsets around gender.

“Even if there are strong women or strong men, we still see that women are not really taking on responsibilities outside the home because their families, or society, is pushing them in that way,” she said. “I know that many of the girls are marrying very early because of this, or many of the girls are not going to school because of this, or not doing what they want to do at school because of this, so we have to change this mentality, this perception, then society will change.”

So how does a board game for 9- to 14-year olds teach this?

“Our first approach is not to teach, but to explore,” she said. Using a design thinking method, each game begins with research and the help of more than 100 volunteers around Turkey who try out the games.

Many of the games encourage players to discuss different topics with the help of prompts—for example, the gender equity game asks questions like, “What do you think of when you hear the word woman/man?” Then continues with questions that flip some of the more common gender stereotypes: “Name any of your boy friends who can cook well,” or, “name a girl friend who has leadership skills.”

“So we are making them think about and discuss gender issues, while they’re also learning about critical thinking and making consensus and working in a team,” she said. “This particular game has already been sent to about a hundred public schools in Turkey, so even when the curriculum doesn’t include gender equality, teachers now have a way to explore the topic through the game material.”

It’s all part of Tugba’s goals to combat stereotypes through dialogue and empathy, while also carrying out the “game-ification” of education, as she called it.

From as early as she can remember—kindergarten, in fact—when it came to the educational system, she’s always thought “there has to be a better way.”

“While things are improving, education in many parts of the world is like a cage for children, where you are not really motivated to learn,” she said. “Learning is the most amazing thing we can do throughout our lives, but while we are children very often it’s like an obligation.”

It was sometime after college, when she held a job running training courses for a European Union program, that she began to see how experiential learning (e.g., games, role playing, and simulations) could invigorate the learning process. If done well, even adults could shake out of their insecurities, and better learn—even enjoy!—a workplace training.

“I noticed that participants in these training courses were being more like themselves; they weren’t judging each other and were being more confident,” Tugba said. “So I started to wonder: How can we use those tools for education? Because education should not only be for cognitive information or knowledge, it should also be a skill, an attitude, an awareness and language. It should be compelling.”

While she hopes to extend the impact of the games’ by translating more of them to English and Arabic, she is resistant to any business strategies that would lessen the social impact of Learning Designs within Turkey. Relationships, Tugba said, are of the utmost importance to her: One way to strengthen connections and bring people together is through playing games, another is through the way she creates them.

“People have told me I should mass produce the games in China for cheap, but I’m producing everything in Turkey because I want to work with local people, social entrepreneurs, and women’s groups and support them,” she said. “My team is always thinking more about impact—how we will make change, how more people will benefit from it—than about profit.”

Success, she said, is not something she’s measuring in numbers, but in the changes she sees in her community, and in the kids playing their games. She described an instance when she was watching children playing a Learning Designs game in the street, and how one little boy refused to follow the game’s instructions to hold hands because it meant he would have to hold the hand of a little girl. About five minutes after being asked why he was refusing, he nonchalantly took the little girl’s hand.

“This is what we want. It’s not about giving them answers, but making them question themselves,” she said. “In many ways, children are more just than adults, and given the chance, I believe that children will find the right way.”

This series highlights our 2019 GATHER Fellows. To learn more about the inspiring social change that Tugba and our other Fellows are working towards, check out #FollowtheFellows on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

As a very small child, no older than 6, Divya says she remembered seeing children begging in the street while visiting family in India. Having only lived in a Midwestern U.S. suburb at the time, her young mind couldn’t make sense of it: “Why are the children so dirty? Where are their parents? Why are they not in school? Why isn’t everyone freaking out?”

“I was told to stay away from them,” she recalled during a phone call from her current home in Baltimore last month. “But I was like, why is it OK that I have what I have, and they have nothing? And why is no one bothered by it?”

From an early age, Divya, a 2019 GATHER Fellow, has been drawn to the people, places, and systems that are, by and large, often overlooked, and she’s long had a knack for seeing when things didn’t quite add up.

She’s so good at unearthing logical flaws, in fact, that among her 2019 GATHER cohort her name became synonymous with searching for the truth. (For example, when the group visited Swedish parliament, she “Divya’d” several policymakers into reluctantly admitting that Sweden sells weapons to Saudi Arabia.)

“Yeah, I guess I ask a lot of questions when things don’t seem to make sense,” she said with a laugh. “When I feel like there are gaps in what people are saying or there seems to be a logical break, I want to know where that’s coming from. I like to fill in that gap.”

Today she’s channeling her inquisitiveness—and her compassion—toward helping some of the most vulnerable populations in countries around the world.

In the midst of pursuing a MD/PhD at John Hopkins School of Public Health and Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, she’s working as a GATHER Fellow to change the narrative around the practitioners and recipients of humanitarian aid—particularly in regards to male unaccompanied refugee minors.

She’s had an opportunity to see firsthand the struggles this group faces, beginning in the summer of 2016 when she volunteered as a translator with an organization aiding refugees in Greece. In multiple visits over the last three years, she’s noticed a level of friction between refugee youths and NGOs that has led to a system of fragmented services. The conflicts over how to help minors has left them with few skills to become independent adults, and even less hope.

“There’s a pretty big disconnect between what an organization is willing to give and thinks is a priority, versus what these young boys actually need and want for a healthy development,” she said. “And if we’re not solving it, they’re going to do it in their own way, which may actually be damaging.”

CAUGHT IN LIMBO

Boys account for over 90 percent of unaccompanied refugee minors, Divya said, many of whom left home before they had the chance to learn skills that would help them flourish at home or in their host countries. Humanitarian aid is often quick to respond to the needs of women and children, but as these unaccompanied boys begin to transition to adulthood, they go from being considered part of the most vulnerable groups (children), to the least vulnerable (single young men). They fall into a sort of limbo, where they may look like young men, but their internal development more closely resembles that of young boys.

In 2016 Divya was one of the first interpreters allowed to enter the minor section of the refugee camp, and because there were so few interpreters who spoke Urdu, she left her phone number with a few of the boys to be a resource.

“Some of the boys, when they lost their accommodations or turned 18 and aged out of receiving services, ended up in very exploitative circumstances, like working labor on a farm where they weren’t allowed to go to the doctor if they got hurt,” she said.

One of those boys did get hurt, and remembering that Divya had some medical training, he called her for advice.

“I was kind of shocked,” she recalled. “The rhetoric around child protection is to protect and take care of these kids who would otherwise be hurt or maybe exploited, and you’re not accomplishing that goal if you’re just letting them out to be exploited the second they turn 18. It was an issue that no one was really addressing at that time, so I decided to do my PhD on it.”

Divya has since returned to the region multiple times for volunteer and thesis-related fieldwork, and what she’s found, as she reported for the Hopkins Bloomberg Public Health Magazine, was that the current systems leave youth ill equipped to deal with the emotional and psychological trauma associated with leaving home and surviving in a new country. Further, they do little to give them the tools, guidance, and support to help them imagine and find ways they might participate in mainstream economies.

She recalled one Afghan minor, for example, who told her that he watches the Greek kids go to school and play football, while he sits in the refugee camp just eating his three meals, day after day, with nothing more to do, nothing to work towards.

“Without parents and teachers and other supportive adults, they often miss out on the ability to build skills that they would need to be independent adults,” Divya said. “As a result, they have no direction, no scaffolding to hold onto as they enter adulthood.”

The solution, she said, wouldn’t involve anything groundbreaking, but it would require NGOs and social service organizations to see and understand unaccompanied minors holistically—the way we understand adolescents in our own communities—rather than through the lens of international treaties and policies.

“They are adolescents, and we know how to raise adolescents,” she said. “But instead, there is a subconscious ‘othering’ of migrants, and we try to create a completely separate model of what we need to do for them. In trying to reinvent this wheel, we miss some critical pieces.”

BREAKING THE SILOS

This fall, Divya will resume medical school (in her program, a doctoral degree is usually obtained between the pre-clinical and clinical years of medical school) in the relatively rural state of New Hampshire. In much of her work, she said she feels as though she is working in silos. Being a part of GATHER, however, has given her the opportunity to “connect with an incredible group of people that sort of helped me think about how I could pull all of the pieces together.”

And she believes it’s through coming together, treating others as we would members of our own family, that refugee youth can have a better chance to thrive, to become contributing members of whatever society eventually becomes their home.

Of all of the things Divya’s done in her brief 28 years, it’s the changing of minds that makes her most proud. She’s seen the way Islamaphobic relatives, acquaintances, and colleagues have changed their thinking towards Muslims after seeing her work in Muslim communities, as well as the way people in conservative communities where she works have changed their opinions toward women.

“When you undo the prejudice, that to me is a huge victory,” she said. “The truth is, every person in the world is more like you than not like you.”

This series highlights our 2019 GATHER Fellows. To learn more about the inspiring social change that Divya and our other Fellows are working towards, check out #FollowtheFellows on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

In 1971, more than a decade before Theo was born, Richard Nixon declared the “War on Drugs.”

If that “war,” or any of the other anti-drug platforms that the United States—and to an extent, Theo’s home country of Canada—had been even mildly successful, Theo and his friends would probably be doing something very different with their lives right now.

Actually, a lot of people—particularly those from historically marginalized groups in the U.S. and communities directly affected by the drug trade in the Americas—would probably be doing something very different with their lives right now.

Theo is a 2019 GATHER Fellow and co-founder of Catalyst, a cross-border education initiative that he said was born out of “a group of friends thinking about the drug education we had received, and how inadequate it was to help us make sense of the things we were seeing around us.”

Growing up in rural Canada, what little drug education Theo received as a child came mostly through the Drug Abuse and Resistance Education (DARE) program. In that program (which has since been declared a failure) a uniformed police officer would come into classrooms and teach 11- and 12-year-olds to “just say no” to drugs. Little, if any, attention was paid to the bigger picture, and even less space was given to kids to process what they might actually be facing in their own homes or communities.

It wasn’t until he attended college in New York City that Theo got a chance to see the rest of the picture: While volunteering at a community garden in Harlem, he began to hear first-hand accounts of the effects of the crack epidemic in the 1980s, police brutality, and young boys being sent to jail for minimal possession. His roommate at the time, Benji, a co-founder of Catalyst, also told him about the drastic spike in violence and militarization that he saw while growing up in Guatemala as a result of the drug war.

“That planted the seed of thinking that there is something here that I need to better understand,” Theo said earlier this month from Mexico City, where he now lives. After undergrad, he went on to pursue a Masters degree at Cambridge University in England, where he dedicated his thesis to the war on drugs.

“The more I started to learn about the history, the more I was really shocked and appalled that it had taken me until my Masters degree to come into contact with this body of knowledge, and I wondered why it had not been made available earlier,” Theo said.

He started thinking about his own drug education, how addiction runs in his father’s family, and, at least in the case of several of his uncles, substance abuse had always been explained to Theo as a personal moral failure of the user rather than a biological or systematic one.

“Around that time, it also came to light that one of my cousins was pretty heavily embedded in the drug trade, and I started thinking a lot about how those experiences weren’t necessarily disconnected from Benji’s experiences in Guatemala. Those drugs come from somewhere, and they follow routes that cross borders, and tie together different countries within the continent,” Theo said. “The more I thought about it, the more it seemed urgent to create a space to think through the full complexity of drugs and drug policy, specifically in the Americas.”

Along with Benji, as well as friends from Philadelphia and Mexico, Theo launched Catalyst in 2017 with the goal of creating opportunities for cross-border dialogue among youth and educators from communities directly affected by the problem. (The problem so far has been the drug war, but there are plans to add a new program around land defense in the Amazon River basin, as well.)

The program is a year-long fellowship for educators and students ages 15 to 18 from North, Central, and South America. Whereas statistics show that this age group is among those most deeply affected by the drug trade, Theo said there is often very little room for their voices in policy debates around the issues. Catalyst seeks to give them that space through their fellowship, which includes a three-week intensive incubator where participants study the problem from a transnational perspective, share personal stories of how the drug war affects them at home, and receive tools and skills to launch projects of their own back in their communities.

Not only are they able to explore the past, present, and future of drug policy debates, but they’re able to learn first hand how interconnected their lives are, despite the borders that might lie between them.

“I think that there’s a lot of power in having students live together and learn together from the different communities,” Theo said. “It is one thing to read about something in an article in the U.S., but when your friend who you have just made over the past few weeks is telling you about how these policies played out for them and their family in their village in Mexico or Colombia — it makes it personal and urgent in ways that reading something in an article or a textbook might not otherwise.”

If there are elements of the program that are starting to ring bells, it’s more than a coincidence. Theo applied for the GATHER Fellowship in part to find community support as Catalyst grows, but as he learned more about Seeds of Peace, he also began to see a kindred spirit in bringing together youth to share their experiences and empowering them to make change.

Some of the challenges Catalyst faces are also similar to those that Seeds of Peace has faced through the years, like convincing parents from places where camps aren’t common that the program was not some sort of scam; obtaining visas for the students to cross borders; raising funding; and, of course, safety for program participants once they return home.

Yet despite those challenges, like many of those with Seeds of Peace who work in areas of conflict, he feels a need to keep pushing, to keep working.

“It feels very urgent—living in Mexico and seeing the suffering that policies in other countries cause here. The levels of violence that this country is experiencing never cease to shock and terrify me,” Theo said. “And knowing that the roots of that violence extend far beyond Mexico, I can only think about this problem as everyone’s responsibility.”

This series highlights our 2019 GATHER Fellows. To learn more about the inspiring social change that Theo and our other Fellows are working towards, check out #FollowtheFellows on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Borders—be they the physical ones defined by governments that might prevent us from having the job or the life that we desire, or the intangible ones that keep us from connecting with a neighbor who is different than ourselves—are never far from Mohammad’s mind.

Through either his father’s job in education or his own studies and career as a renewable energy and economic development expert, the son of Palestinian refugees has traversed many, many borders—among the places where he’s lived, worked, or studied are Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Israel, Tunisia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Oman, London, and New York City, and he hopes to soon add Paris, and eventually Vancouver, to that list.

While it wasn’t always easy, he said this mobile lifestyle shaped who he is: A self-described “nomadic Arab” who is naturally curious, easily maneuvers between cultures, and is always looking for the story, opportunity, or connection that is just beyond the lines that typically divide us. Occasionally borders slow him down, but more often than not, they are what motivate and inspire him.

“My biggest passion is the idea of a borderless world,” the 2019 GATHER Fellow said, speaking by phone last week from a sidewalk cafe in Amman. “A world where I am not judged for where I was born or where my parents were born, but for who I am. A world where people can transcend boundaries and borders, where they can connect with one another on a deeply fundamental level.”

His focus in particular is Middle Easterners who have been forced to leave their homelands to resettle in Europe. Amid a rise in anti-Semitism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and nationalistic sentiments across Europe, he is looking to change the narrative around the Middle Eastern diaspora there by uniting it.

Enter the Mediterranean Migration Narrative Project, an initiative that Mohammad co-founded and that is at the core of his work as a GATHER Fellow. The project would create a network of the Middle Eastern diaspora in Europe—namely the Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews who migrated in the middle of the last century and the more recent Arab refugees—to share their stories, form meaningful connections, and hopefully establish productive collaborations in food, business, and the arts.

The outcome, he said, will hopefully change the perception around refugees so that they can be seen not as a burden to their new neighbors, but as valuable additions to their communities.

“One of the big purposes of this project is to assert a more positive image of Middle Easterners,” Mohammad said. “People love food, art, technology, and businesses that create jobs, so connecting them so they start projects that change them, and the societies around them, for the better is one way to insert positive impact from within these communities that they now call home.”

The idea for the project was born out of friendships with several people who are now helping him build the program. Particularly meaningful was the story of his friend Rafram, a Jewish artist and culinary expert whom he met while living in Tunisia. Rafram was born on the Tunisian island of Djerba, but at a young age his family, along with many other Jews at the time, left the island to seek opportunities in Israel.

El Ghriba Synagogue in Tunisia

“More so than his departure from Tunisia, it was his decision to return that inspired me,” Mohammad said. “As an adult Rafram said, “OK, I’m going back to my home country and I’m going to use art and food to revive a thriving Jewish culture in a place that’s become monolithic.’ That was pretty amazing to me.”

As a Palestinian, he said that looking at refugees as productive members of society has always been part of his story, and he’s troubled to see the region that he grew up in become increasingly less diverse.

“The Middle East is unfortunately becoming less and less diverse,” he said. “It was first the Jews in the middle of the last century, and today it’s the Yazidis, Assyrians, and Copts who are being socially coerced to leave.”

So as much as he is driven to show Western societies the benefits of welcoming refugees into their communities, he is also eager to show the Middle East what is lost when a society becomes less diverse.

“The first thing it loses is its creativity because diversity fosters an atmosphere of thinking outside the box. Just think of how many tech startups in the U.S. were created by immigrants,” he said. “So by demonstrating the value that these minority groups bring to their new communities, I’m also trying to send a message to people in the Middle East: Look at what you’ve lost by forcing minorities out, and how wonderful it would be if these minorities were working back at home, and what type of opportunities they could provide.”

The project is still in its very early days: Mohammad and his collaborators are currently searching for the right 16 candidates for the first cohort. Ideally, he’ll move to Paris this fall so that he can meet with candidates and potential partners there, as well as in Berlin and Rome, where he hopes to hold three workshops over the course of a year. His biggest challenge at the moment is funding, but he’s optimistic that he’ll have the cohort lined up by the end of the year.

And if all goes according to plan, he won’t be running the program several years from now.

“The dream I have for this is that I won’t hold it forever,” he said. “I’m hoping that Jewish and Arab people in Europe will step up to become executive directors so that it becomes run by and for Europeans of Middle Eastern descent.”

There is much work to be done, and there’s no guarantee that the blood, sweat, and many, many hours that he pours into this project will pay off. He’s taking small jobs here and there to pay the bills until funding is secured, but Mohammad said he’s not deterred. His curiosity, his desire to reach beyond borders, and, most importantly, his commitment to create something lasting that others can build upon, won’t let him rest until he sees this project through.

“There’s a story in the Muslim faith, that when God created Adam, he said he wanted to create a ‘khalifa,’ which is Arabic for ‘successor,’” Mohammad explained. “Humans are on earth for a reason, and that reason is to create a better world for those who will come after them. So to borrow that phrase, it’s about being a good khalifa and leaving something behind that people can take and build upon and take to the next level.”

This series highlights our 2019 GATHER Fellows. To learn more about the inspiring social change that Mohammad and our other Fellows are working towards, check out #FollowtheFellows on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.