Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to the YYY podcast by Social Marie.
Speaker: In this third episode you are going to listen to stories coming from Austria.
Speaker: Nina will be sharing the story from Lely, Love for Life, and Lucas will be sharing the amazing story of Anderesaitz.
Speaker: I hope I pronounced it well.
Speaker: Both projects are winners of the awards for 2023.
Speaker: And I have to tell you, each one of these entrepreneurs really managed to impact me.
Speaker: It is amazing to see young people with such a level of wisdom and drive and motivation for making this world a better place.
Speaker: Hi, I'm Nina, living and working in Graz as a psychotherapist and I'm the founder of the Lely Day Center.
Speaker: Nina, thank you for being here.
Speaker: Could you tell us why did you start?
Speaker: So why did I start?
Speaker: Maybe that sounds a little weird, but I simply felt like it's my call to start.
Speaker: Because back then, as I nearly have finished my law studies, I recognized that my energy and my interest is more and more in focusing on people and their behavior itself.
Speaker: to understand them and to understand me and support them and cultivate healing spaces.
Speaker: for people who are struggling from mental health issues and for myself to believe that hurt people hurt people and heal people heal people as I said before so I decided to finish my law studies and started my psychotherapy study at the same time
Speaker: And in 2018, I started my internship for my psychotherapy qualification at the psychology hospital in Graz.
Speaker: I worked at the station for people who are suffering from eating disorders and get to know many young women who stayed at hospital for months to get along with these serious health conditions that affect both their physical and their mental health.
Speaker: And when they went home after this long time in hospital, they often tried to manage their new lives, but find it hard to handle it at home alone, without a daily routine, without a safe space where they can speak about their struggles, and without a high-frequented therapy.
Speaker: And they feel alone and isolated and so they need their old patterns to cope with this situation.
Speaker: At this time, I was very unhappy in my previous job.
Speaker: And I was on my way to a meeting in Vienna by train when I met Susanne.
Speaker: Susanne Maurer-Aldrien is the CEO of Lebensgroß in Graz.
Speaker: And we talked a lot of the situation and we decided that we want to fill this gap between a stay in hospital and the outpatient care in daily life.
Speaker: And this was how the Lili idea was born.
Speaker: Super.
Speaker: So I have curiosity about what you mean by healing spaces.
Speaker: I don't know if you could say a bit more about it.
Speaker: With healing spaces, I mean a safe space where people can come and just be as they are.
Speaker: They don't have to be anyone.
Speaker: They don't have to work.
Speaker: They don't have to try to
Speaker: to be someone they don't really are.
Speaker: And this could be if there are people in the space who are good to them, who mean good to them.
Speaker: And in a world we have, which is getting faster and faster and space is getting tighter and tighter, we should not focus on the space
Speaker: on our deficit or see mental issues as weaknesses, but we have to see them as very intelligent ways for people to cope with their life situations.
Speaker: And we need time to digest our experiences in a world with multiple crises and so much data information on social media and others.
Speaker: media in general so that we have we need time to digest these informations and these experiences um the because digesting leads to integration
Speaker: And if we don't have this time or a safe space, we store this information and we get jammed up with the stuff and pressure is getting higher.
Speaker: And then we feel like drowning in this world or like we have to control everything because we can't feel safe anymore.
Speaker: We are all definitely in a path of self-discovery, right?
Speaker: So we are constantly trying to know who we are and how important it is to include also our perceived weaknesses and also what we don't know from ourselves, right?
Speaker: It's not only to lean towards positive thinking or focusing only on existing strengths, right?
Speaker: But I think that at least in my life, I see that being conscious of my weaknesses is a useful thing.
Speaker: Sometimes my weaknesses became my biggest strengths.
Speaker: They just needed some development.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And many people think to work with or to deal with your mental health issue means you have to think positive or you have to be happy again.
Speaker: But I think it means that you have the braveness to be brave enough to sit with your messiness.
Speaker: Because these feelings are the feelings we don't want to have.
Speaker: We have to cope then.
Speaker: But if you can learn to regulate yourself with a safe person next to you in the beginning to co-regulation...
Speaker: you can learn to sit with the messiness and with the bad feelings.
Speaker: And if you can handle them, you can be happy or positive even more than if you don't want to feel these feelings.
Speaker: I read somewhere that we are like moths.
Speaker: You know what a moth is?
Speaker: No.
Speaker: Is this kind of a butterfly that are at night?
Speaker: Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So and they go to the light.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So if you have the light there, they're going there and they are so attracted by the magic of the light that actually they end up burned.
Speaker: The person that was telling this, the moth story, said that humans are very much like that, that we are very much like moths.
Speaker: But the light is what we think is good.
Speaker: is what we know.
Speaker: And we think that what we know is right, is correct.
Speaker: We cannot see that it's incomplete, right?
Speaker: And we cannot see that the darkness, so what we don't know, is also part of who we are.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Because there are parts that we don't understand about ourselves.
Speaker: There are parts that are not conscious about ourselves.
Speaker: Therefore, as soon as we feel that there's something in me
Speaker: We escape from it and we run to the light, we run to what is positive and then we cannot understand why are we burning out?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: And it's because this constant effort to not accept who we really are as we are and trying to lean towards what feels right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And you have to, I think you have to embrace both the light and the darkness.
Speaker: Nina, why do you think Lely is a successful initiative?
Speaker: There are many points, but the first one I want to mention is that we focus and we see the person behind their coping mechanism.
Speaker: They're firefighters, as we call them.
Speaker: And we focus on their resources, on their healthy parts and not on their deficits or their failures.
Speaker: We hear them and we see them and we support them where they are.
Speaker: no matter how hard they're struggling at the moment.
Speaker: And beside the therapy on the behavioral level, like eating, not eating, something like that, we concentrate on the person behind the symptom eating disorder.
Speaker: I always say the most important thing to learn is an eating disorder is not about eating.
Speaker: And this is why Lely tries to develop a trauma-sensitive treatment for eating disorders.
Speaker: with an existential view of humanity.
Speaker: So we see the person and not the illness.
Speaker: And Lely is the first facility of its kind in Austria.
Speaker: who try to close the gap between this inpatient and outpatient treatment.
Speaker: And we try to reconcile therapy in everyday life.
Speaker: So we try to manage therapy programs to fit in the life of the people and not the way around.
Speaker: We have...
Speaker: We have a quote in Lely which says, we want to walk our talk.
Speaker: So we want to live what we are talking and we want to live and train the things we say to our participants, ourselves.
Speaker: And...
Speaker: Therefore, we use the method of neurodiscolation in the treatment of our participants.
Speaker: This method supports the team in applying the newest insights of neurobiology, attachment theory, trauma theory and body psychotherapy to the special case of eating disorders.
Speaker: I think this is a success because we do like that.
Speaker: Because we see the people and we don't want to fit them in the programs.
Speaker: And it's just a new point of view in eating disorders and in mental illnesses in general.
Speaker: Because there are many programs that focus on the behavior.
Speaker: just try to train eating, for example, but we want to know why is it so hard for you?
Speaker: What do you achieve with this?
Speaker: Why do you need this coping mechanism?
Speaker: What is the intelligent part of it?
Speaker: Because I think it is...
Speaker: People feel more seen if we ask, why do you need it?
Speaker: Then we say, you have to stop it.
Speaker: Because I need an alternative before I can stop it.
Speaker: And we try to look at the potential and when we can address the healthy parts, the alternatives come by themselves.
Speaker: That's my experience about it.
Speaker: And I think a big part why it succeeds is we are in a big organization, Lebensgross.
Speaker: We are part of them and Lebensgross is an organization who cares a lot about being together, being connected to support people.
Speaker: And that's why Lely is part of a system which tries to cultivate healing spaces.
Speaker: And in terms of business model, for example, and the difficulty of raising capital or funding the initiative itself,
Speaker: I think it's good to be part of a bigger organization for these cases.
Speaker: And it was in 2020 when we tried to begin the fundraising and we thought it will be harder.
Speaker: And I think it was the right time
Speaker: because in the pandemic, the eating disorders exploded in hospitals.
Speaker: And I think it was exactly the right time to start such a project.
Speaker: And now we're in the next funding period.
Speaker: for the next three years.
Speaker: And it wasn't a problem because I think everyone sees what we're doing and that people need this place.
Speaker: Why to persist?
Speaker: What is motivating you to keep your work?
Speaker: what is I think I see it as our mission as society to cultivate safe spaces where people can feel safe and connect and heal because if we do not there will be a world I don't want it
Speaker: to be part of it so much so I see it as a mission for me to to try to change the things to cultivate the spaces it's my heart is with it that's the reason for me to persist even if it's hard
Speaker: How are Lely's participants supporting your mission, supporting your energy and your drive?
Speaker: They tell us that Lely is this place for them.
Speaker: It's so beautiful to see even if they are maybe working again or go to school again and then there are maybe difficulties on their way.
Speaker: They call and they say, can I come again?
Speaker: I know at Lili is a safe space for me where I can be.
Speaker: And that's the most important feedback for me if this message is at the participants too.
Speaker: Let me introduce you to Lukas Werner.
Speaker: He represents an initiative called Andererseits and is a prize winner for 2023 from Austria.
Speaker: I'm fascinated by his story, his background, his curiosity for diversity.
Speaker: and all what he has been through in the past few years, being a young man with so much knowledge and experience.
Speaker: But don't let me spoil the interview.
Speaker: Better listen the story directly from him.
Speaker: Lucas, how did everything start?
Speaker: I started out of...
Speaker: By chance and out of interest, I happened to come upon projects that invited me to experiment, to learn.
Speaker: Even before my current venture and even my first business, I was just a high schooler and there was a nice program where you could travel a bit, get to learn, get to know people from all over Europe.
Speaker: And I thought,
Speaker: Sounds like a nice weekend.
Speaker: I can do it during school time.
Speaker: It's even paid for by the school.
Speaker: Fantastic.
Speaker: Why not do it?
Speaker: And half a year later, I'm at the seventh conference and I'm talking to an Armenian friend and Azerbaijani friend at the same time, which is the magic of those conferences that you can have the two of them standing next to each other and having a conversation.
Speaker: And
Speaker: I'm realizing, okay, this is fantastic.
Speaker: I want to try and create such spaces myself.
Speaker: And then it was a youth organization, it was called the European Youth Parliament, and it gave you a lot of opportunities to experiment and to get into positions where you can actually affect the organization for everybody else as well.
Speaker: Because the oldest people in the organization are 25, 26.
Speaker: And, um, I realized, okay, I had this really cool opportunity.
Speaker: Um, and the people who created this opportunity for me, they're only one or two years older than me.
Speaker: So, um, if I want somebody else to have this opportunity, then I need to organize a conference.
Speaker: Um, and I started to look at, okay, what do I actually need to do in order to create such a conference?
Speaker: And again, there I was very lucky because I had a few mentors and I had a support network and that, um,
Speaker: showed me the lessons they learned without telling me that that's the way I have to do it.
Speaker: And they gave me the confidence to try it.
Speaker: And so I learned a lot of things in those gears.
Speaker: And I learned that I am very good at taking ideas that are out there and helping to make them a bit broader, to make them more accessible.
Speaker: and to put them on a more midterm basis.
Speaker: So my biggest theme was always having the medium term in mind, because in the long term, there's so much uncertainty, you can't really plan for it if you're doing something innovative.
Speaker: In the short term, yeah, sure, that's what comes to mind first, but let's focus on the medium term.
Speaker: And then...
Speaker: Again, I was very fortunate in that sense.
Speaker: I was able to study.
Speaker: I was able to learn a lot, to get to know the world a bit, do an exchange, travel to different countries.
Speaker: And then I also started the first small business.
Speaker: We realized that this business did not really make any sense.
Speaker: So we shut it down after only a few months.
Speaker: But again, it was a fun experience and I tried it out and I was fortunate enough to be able to try it out.
Speaker: And then I could also say I had done it.
Speaker: So when I was looking for people who were going to go on adventures with me, I could say, I've already done this before.
Speaker: Don't worry.
Speaker: We'll make something great out of it.
Speaker: And so.
Speaker: All of this is happening and I'm at the point in my life where the youth NGO work, I'm starting to be a bit too old for that.
Speaker: And I'm starting to finish or I'm getting to the end of my degree.
Speaker: So I realized, okay, I know the theory and now it's time to find something that I want to spend the next few years on.
Speaker: And, but I thought,
Speaker: The project's gonna be gonna, gonna be coming around.
Speaker: Eventually I'll do some internships, whatever.
Speaker: Um, I'll go on an exchange.
Speaker: So I went on an exchange and, uh, a few months in COVID hit and everything was cut short.
Speaker: So I had to come back home and I realized, okay, um, what do I do now?
Speaker: Um, I don't really, really have a plan.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: let's look at what people around me are doing.
Speaker: And then I found a friend of mine, a former friend of mine, who started this wild experiment of having journalists with and without disabilities collaborating on quality pieces.
Speaker: And I thought, okay, that's a great idea.
Speaker: They're already doing great work.
Speaker: But
Speaker: At that point, they by themselves already realized, okay, we are, there is more to this idea, but we don't really have a structure to make this, to make this work in the medium term again.
Speaker: And they put out a public call who wants to help us with organizing and raising money.
Speaker: And a few phone calls later, and I was involved in the project and from there on it grew to now,
Speaker: the venture that is at the center of my life.
Speaker: And that's also defining my career in the middle of innovation and societal impact.
Speaker: So it's less that I thought I want to make the world better.
Speaker: It's more that I thought this is really fun.
Speaker: This is really innovative.
Speaker: I can apply my skills to this.
Speaker: And at the same time, it's, it's work that's also quite rewarding.
Speaker: And again, I had the luxury of having, of, of starting this or this, this venture found me before I had the economical pressure of having to survive because I was still in, in uni.
Speaker: So I could try it out.
Speaker: I was a volunteer at first for an entire year.
Speaker: Before we got the project to a point where we said, okay, there is so much behind this idea.
Speaker: Let's, let's make this into a venture.
Speaker: You're definitely attracted to people, to diversity and to politics.
Speaker: Am I right?
Speaker: No, I think that's very much true.
Speaker: I was always curious about people who had a different reality in life than my own.
Speaker: And I first found that with people abroad, even though thinking about it now, like
Speaker: Those were all people who could afford to travel abroad.
Speaker: It was still people from a similar socioeconomic background, but still from a different national background, a different cultural background.
Speaker: We have a common interest.
Speaker: That interest was making cross-cultural connections.
Speaker: And so it was always interesting for me to find out, okay, what's life like for them and what makes a project special is when it works for them as well as for me.
Speaker: And now my main work and my main dedication and time and energy and resources, they go into the field of journalism, which I never really particularly had in mind for a future career.
Speaker: But then
Speaker: I realized, okay, this is very much related to how we as a society work, how we discuss
Speaker: important societal issues and also how we communicate cross-culturally to some extent.
Speaker: And then also the topic of disability and connection with that, it's again a reality in life that's different to my own.
Speaker: But for us, the main concept that we discover or just realize is that an inclusive workplace is a workplace that respects individual needs
Speaker: So, um, if I, for example, uh, am a wheelchair user, then I need a desk that I can, um, modify that I can, that I can lift up or, or, um, put down, uh, depending on, on my need at the moment.
Speaker: Um, and for me, for example, a need is that I can be very flexible, um, with my location that I can work from home, that I can work from the office, um,
Speaker: And that I can communicate with people in the, on the channels that work best for me.
Speaker: And again, it doesn't really pay off to distinguish between participants in the project with a disability and those without, but what's actually providing value is really respecting those individual needs.
Speaker: And that's why I was motivated enough to also start Andresaids as a venture together with the people who had the idea originally, because I found that it let me explore the realities of people who had a different reality than my own, but at the same time find and innovate structures that work for both of us.
Speaker: I believe that the path of entrepreneurship is a path of self-discovery and that self-discovery includes what we like of us, our strengths, and what we dislike about ourselves.
Speaker: That can become strengths as well, but we need just to pay attention.
Speaker: At the end, social entrepreneurship, social impact, tech entrepreneurship or any other practice of business
Speaker: brings us to this realization that if we really want to experience our potential, we need to get to know ourselves.
Speaker: And that means accepting what seems to be a weakness that might transform into a unique strength.
Speaker: In your case, would you say that inclusion is a driving force in your life?
Speaker: Inclusion and innovation, because in my current project, yes, inclusion is at the core of it, but we have three goals as an organization, for example.
Speaker: It's inclusion, it's independent journalism, and it's fair working conditions.
Speaker: So again, it's always a multiple and it's always a connection of issues that makes the most interesting projects.
Speaker: If you just want to be inclusive, then you might be able to, or you might make compromises that tarnish the project as a whole.
Speaker: And on the other hand, if you just want to report independently, but don't look at inclusion,
Speaker: you're losing something of the whole.
Speaker: So for us, the combination of one was those three goals.
Speaker: And it was exciting to me because I could see that there aren't many organizations out there
Speaker: even though they have enormous resources, we have really big media companies in Europe, but they are struggling to take even basic measures to becoming more inclusive organizations.
Speaker: Why is that?
Speaker: Is that because they can't afford to?
Speaker: Is it because it isn't possible?
Speaker: Or is it because they never integrated those perspectives into their workforce, into their strategy, and because they never tried?
Speaker: So for us, we also had to develop a lot of new things.
Speaker: We didn't start with a lot of answers.
Speaker: We started with a few ideas and a lot of motivation.
Speaker: So I think, especially for social entrepreneurs, when they find something that they would do as a volunteer, but that also has an impact, that's always a good indication that there might be a social entrepreneurship project in there because
Speaker: To truly achieve impact on a broad or deep scale, you need some sort of organization, you need professionalism, but then to persist through the challenges that are particular to social entrepreneurship, it needs to be something that is close enough to your heart that you are motivated enough to go through those challenges.
Speaker: I think that for social entrepreneurs, it is easy to get moved by our enthusiasm and our willingness to solve social issues.
Speaker: But at the same time, it becomes easy to forget about business models and creating structures that will build solid foundations for our initiatives.
Speaker: And about finding your role, I'd say, because for me,
Speaker: again, I'm not an expert in inclusion.
Speaker: I'm not an expert in a lot of things, actually.
Speaker: And I don't have a lot of answers, but I can help people who have those perspectives make their voices heard and also translate those voices into a strategy and then it's actionable.
Speaker: So there is hardly ever any venture that is really only driven by one person, but often you have
Speaker: facilitators, catalysts, I'd say, in organizations that can then amplify ideas that are already out there.
Speaker: And that's, I think, what distinguishes social enterprises from, I'd say, hobby projects is that you are willing to take back, I'd say, your own view and then open yourself up to what is out there.
Speaker: And what also works under the conditions of really real life.
Speaker: Why do you think your current project is successful?
Speaker: Why did it work?
Speaker: So on a broader perspective or with a broader view, Anarza works because we actually fulfill a need that has been out there for a long term, for a long time.
Speaker: that that hadn't been recognized.
Speaker: So, we do a lot of user innovation, we do a lot of user research, and we identify that we have three main levers of impact.
Speaker: One is internal.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: The journalists that come work for us, often they're young journalists and then train with us.
Speaker: Because if you're a journalist without a disability, there's hardly ever the chance to work with somebody with a disability.
Speaker: So this inclusive collaboration is also that you need to learn.
Speaker: If you're a journalist with a disability, then a lot of the traditional educational paths towards journalism are closed to you.
Speaker: So this is one aspect.
Speaker: Where we see, okay, there is a lot of creative potential.
Speaker: There are amazing journalists, but they've never been given the chance to engage in reporting because traditional organizations just shut them out.
Speaker: They never even get to the hiring phase.
Speaker: And then on the readership side, you can see that there are a lot of readers.
Speaker: So in the Austrian population, for example, you have around 18% who have a disability.
Speaker: It's a lot.
Speaker: And then everybody who knows someone who has a disability.
Speaker: So you have a lot of people who have actually some kind of touchpoint with disability, but there's really little authentic reporting from that perspective.
Speaker: So if I want to be heard and if I want to explain disability, I don't have a lot of resources.
Speaker: That's another need we fill.
Speaker: And then finally, if I am for aware of, of issues of social justice, if I am aware of gender equality of anti-racism and then I look around and I realize, okay, I have a neighbor who maybe uses a wheelchair, but I'm too afraid to
Speaker: you know, talk to him because I don't want to say something bad or I really don't understand his perspective on life.
Speaker: But I would like to, because it's a facet of the whole issue of social justice.
Speaker: Then it's very difficult often to do that in a personal context.
Speaker: And it's easier if you do it on a structured context through reporting.
Speaker: So that's the third need that we need.
Speaker: So there are existing needs out there that would actually be relevant to every media organization.
Speaker: That's also why we say in the long term, we want to make ourselves irrelevant because every media organization should become
Speaker: an inclusive media organization, but in the medium term, we are the ones that are developing new methods of making it work and then of actually offering this.
Speaker: In other words, this venture is successful because it is addressing a need that has been ignored for a long time.
Speaker: And that has been around for a long time.
Speaker: It took us also a year and a half to realize that actually all we do can be summarized in a sentence.
Speaker: If you engage with Andresatz, you can learn to understand and explain this ability.
Speaker: That's the core need that we fulfill.
Speaker: And if you
Speaker: after a while and after some experimentation are able to, to find this specific point where you can, um, provide value, um, that doesn't need to be monetary value.
Speaker: Um, then you have something that, that, uh, you can, you can make into a big organization that can have deeper impact.
Speaker: And then the questions of business models, et cetera, they are, they're, um, enablers.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: If you can provide value to a specific group and if this value creates impact, for example, foundations could be a part of your business model.
Speaker: And if it is a monetary value or if it's something that's close to existing products.
Speaker: So for example, you have a more sustainable way to travel.
Speaker: Then that fulfills a new need, but also just quite a regular need.
Speaker: I want to travel somewhere.
Speaker: And then you can probably run a more traditional business model.
Speaker: But yeah, so I don't think that anything in the business model makes it special.
Speaker: It's just that we concentrated on this user need and that we
Speaker: everything we do, we developed from the perspective of the user and we had to because we didn't have a big investment.
Speaker: We were at first six and 30 young people with some free time and then in the pandemic.
Speaker: who tried to make this into a project.
Speaker: So if you don't have any resources, you need to be really efficient.
Speaker: And if you want to be really efficient, you have to listen to users from very early on.
Speaker: And that's also why we kept the focus until now.
Speaker: And secondly, we also had a support network.
Speaker: I think that's important not to ignore.
Speaker: We were just very lucky to have a few...
Speaker: mentors who are in the industry who could provide us with some guidance, save us from running into a few avenues that would have taken away a lot from our focus.
Speaker: And also in terms of social entrepreneurship, there are some programs out there, especially in Austria that can help in particular young people develop ideas into project
Speaker: And to also make sure that this is viable in the medium to long-term because you can do a lot with motivation, energy and self exploitation.
Speaker: But realizing your limits, also realizing the dangers of burnout and especially amongst social entrepreneurs.
Speaker: is really important to be able to make it truly successful because if you, if you burn out before you, you have created, um, or if you burn out at the expense of, of creating something, then you have not truly achieved success.
Speaker: You just mentioned burnout and that's so important.
Speaker: Social entrepreneurship is so hard and, um,
Speaker: That leads me to the question, why to persist?
Speaker: I think the biggest part is that we're just not done.
Speaker: Um, and we are, we can see that we're going in the right direction.
Speaker: So we have, uh, um, not just a naive idea that was, but we, what helped us persist in the beginning where we didn't even realize the challenges.
Speaker: So we started off without any resources, without any structure, um,
Speaker: And we also founded the company with far too little resources, if I'm honest now, looking back.
Speaker: But at first you can do it because you don't realize what is ahead of you.
Speaker: And because you have a lot of trust and because it's better to have tried than not to have tried.
Speaker: So for us at the beginning, it was about
Speaker: risk limitation and then we said, okay, this, if, even if everything fails, it will have been worth it because we tried.
Speaker: And now it shifted away from this idea of let's try and see what sticks.
Speaker: towards a more and more concrete idea of what we want to achieve.
Speaker: And we know the logic of how we create impact.
Speaker: We know how we can measure it.
Speaker: We know what is out there to be done.
Speaker: As I said, in the long term, we should be relevant.
Speaker: Of course, that's a very long term perspective because you need to change the entire media market and you need to change organizations that have been around for a long term and that are also
Speaker: far more entrenched in the existing political system.
Speaker: So change takes a long time, especially in media organizations at a larger scale.
Speaker: So we realized that there is the need that this need will not go away, but at the same time, we're filling it and we are making progress.
Speaker: And
Speaker: That's what currently motivates me a lot and also my team is that we can see our progress and we can also look back at what we learned.
Speaker: So we, for example, we created two documentaries and then the first one had the biggest public impact.
Speaker: So it was talked about a lot.
Speaker: The president of the Republic issued a statement.
Speaker: Fantastic.
Speaker: Um, and then in the second documentary, um, we had far, far less reporting, but then at the same time we, um, create, we had a few measures that, that made the documentary far more accessible than the first one.
Speaker: So in the first one, for example, we had a presenter with a disability, but in the second one, we had a presenter, uh, who also research, uh, for the, for the documentary and, um,
Speaker: The narration in the first documentary was quite classic narration.
Speaker: In the second documentary, the narration also served as an audio description.
Speaker: So again, we.
Speaker: learned and experienced it a lot.
Speaker: And then also we managed to still reach the right people.
Speaker: So we know that because of the documentary now in disaster management plans in the update process for those disaster management plans in some counties, organizations that are working on this are taking into consideration the perspective that we brought for the documentary.
Speaker: So you can't take the same metric to keep yourself going, but you need to be very clear about it.
Speaker: what you want to achieve and how you measure if you are going towards that direction.
Speaker: And for us, inclusion in the societal impact is more important than clicks.
Speaker: And this is why we still consider it a success.
Speaker: And why also the second documentary, even though fewer people watched it, motivates us to keep going.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So the reason why to persist is because you can see what works, right?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Lucas, thank you so much for sharing your story.
Speaker: Would you like to share something else with our audience?
Speaker: I just want to encourage listeners who are curious, um, to go out and find the resources, um, that are there to support them.
Speaker: A lot of founders and a lot of those people who are, who are the most present maybe, um, are not the ones who, who drive the deepest impact.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: And a lot of people who have great ideas, never tell them to anybody because they fear that it's a ridiculous idea that they themselves can't make it a reality or that somebody else will steal the idea from them.
Speaker: And it's just not a fear that I've ever seen validated.
Speaker: I think it's extremely important to talk about your ideas and to find allies and structures that help you grow them.
Speaker: Would you like to listen to the conversation between two experts that just listened to the stories from Nina and Lukas?
Speaker: Let me introduce you to Andrea and Gabi.
Speaker: My name is Andrea.
Speaker: I'm a social entrepreneur.
Speaker: I live in Croatia and I'm an evaluator of Social Media Prize.
Speaker: And I work in the area of social entrepreneurship.
Speaker: Gabi, can you tell us something about yourself?
Speaker: Yes, hello.
Speaker: So my name is Gabi Göbel.
Speaker: I am originally from Hungary.
Speaker: I currently live in Vienna and I'm working with NGOs and with academia and trying to connect the two.
Speaker: And I am a Hungarian evaluator for Sotia Amari.
Speaker: After listening to Nina and Lukas, what captured your imagination the most?
Speaker: So the first thing that struck me was the fact that EU youth networks or just youth networks, how important they are, because these are young people who are running their own social enterprises.
Speaker: But then on the other side, the networks, especially youth networks, provided them an opportunity to work, to grow,
Speaker: to experiment even a little bit.
Speaker: And actually, that is, let's say, first step in their professional career development and gaining experience.
Speaker: Anything to add?
Speaker: Yes, I also noticed that in a way, both of the speakers have a previous sort of professional trajectory or direction they went to and then found something that was really a call or a purpose for them.
Speaker: Yeah, definitely.
Speaker: And also, one of the things that I realized when they were talking is that
Speaker: I think both of them didn't have their own business ideas.
Speaker: In a sense, they didn't come up with, wow, I have a huge big idea.
Speaker: However, they recognized the opportunity among existing needs in the society, either through the friends, through other organizations.
Speaker: But that is also something that is, I think, very, very important to strengthen, especially for young people.
Speaker: you can also add value to existing idea and you can build the idea with your knowledge, skills, creativity, innovative approach, whatever.
Speaker: And then that can become a business, successful business that is in this case also socially driven and helps marginalized, excluded people.
Speaker: But the point is that don't be afraid of being part of somebody else's dream if you have
Speaker: idea and potential to add additional value.
Speaker: Yes, and Lucas says that he's not an expert specifically on any of the themes that the project is focusing on, but he can add another aspect to it and then the puzzle becomes somehow complete.
Speaker: And the other similarity that I found
Speaker: was that they see beyond people's conditions.
Speaker: So one of the projects worked with people living with disabilities and the other one is working with people with eating disorders.
Speaker: And both of them sees the person or the human being beyond those conditions that we all have to some extent.
Speaker: Maybe it's a disease, maybe it's a disability, but like our, maybe our less loved features as well.
Speaker: And then the idea of a society and also of these projects is that there are individuals who are trying to function as a community or a society on a larger scale.
Speaker: And then that means that you have to see the other human beings.
Speaker: So both of them are very inclusive in that sense that you need to have different kind of point of views and allow people to join whatever you do or how you imagine making change.
Speaker: So what was also interesting and the lesson and the information, the message that I got is we focus on healthy parts of people, of individual, not the difficulties that the individual has.
Speaker: And I think that was stressed by Lily particularly.
Speaker: However, when I listen to the other interview, I also realized that that is the point because they provide fair working conditions.
Speaker: inclusive workspace which respects individuals.
Speaker: So I think this is also very similar to both projects, respect of people who are in any way different than, let's say, majority of society.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: What I often see related to these projects is that when there are these ideas to making good or change society in many ways, sometimes the call or the purpose is so strong that people...
Speaker: can run projects for a while based on just their own enthusiasm and devotion.
Speaker: But in the long run, it's really, really important to have structure and to build the professional side or the business side of these projects because most, most cases, otherwise they will not be sustainable.
Speaker: The point of social business is to take care of
Speaker: the problem of society or environmental issues, people issues, whatever.
Speaker: But they need to do it on a business way.
Speaker: So it is important to have this business side, but then on the other side, if we compare it to technological startups and all that, yes, social enterprises in majority of cases do care much more about people.
Speaker: And they care much more to help them to solve their problems.
Speaker: However, it's not rare anymore to have
Speaker: technological startups who are also social enterprises because by their business model, product or service, they do provide kind of a service or product to people who are in need.
Speaker: So this combination of being, taking care of people and doing your business, I think it's changing.
Speaker: I think the paradigm of business is slowly changing and
Speaker: Not as fast as I would expect and I would wish, but basically it is slowly changing.
Speaker: Yes, I just wanted to add that this taking care of people, I think partly why it's important to have a business model is that you can take care of your own people working on these projects as well.
Speaker: So you have a structure, you have an idea, you can provide yourself as well.
Speaker: If you focus on Nina and Lucas more than in the ventures they run, do you find some common ground?
Speaker: What I think it's similar and we partly mentioned it, is that they found their own momentum within these somewhat random encounters with people and with ideas.
Speaker: So they didn't have a definite idea of what they wanted to do.
Speaker: They wanted to do something that has value and purpose.
Speaker: And then
Speaker: I think Nina was talking about that she met someone by accident with whom she could team up.
Speaker: And then Lucas as well found a team.
Speaker: and a community of people with whom he could develop more.
Speaker: And to add to that, after they started to be involved in these social enterprise stories, I would say the common thing between them is persistence and in a way stubbornness.
Speaker: It was not said, of course, but you know, when you listen how they developed further the business model,
Speaker: And the social side of the business, I think they are stubborn people who are, you know, solving many challenges within the business, even though they are not probably equipped with the business side of it.
Speaker: But it's a long path.
Speaker: It takes time, but it's possible.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Also, this is what I...
Speaker: heard between the lines when they were speaking that this is what I have to do.
Speaker: This is right.
Speaker: This is important without any question.
Speaker: And I think this is what is quite often the motor of these kinds of projects that the people are just convinced that they want to do it and that what they are doing is important.
Speaker: Using the stories you just heard as a framework, what would you recommend to any aspiring social entrepreneur or social innovator?
Speaker: I would recommend to talk to and meet like-minded people working on similar ideas because it's one of the most important things that you see what others are doing and how they do it.
Speaker: And as Andrea already mentioned, that the business idea or the business models are changing.
Speaker: There are more and more programs who are incubating and supporting these kind of specifically social entrepreneurships as well.
Speaker: But this type of innovative approach is to provide a structural background or a business model that somehow can be adjusted to ideas.
Speaker: Yeah, and back to the beginning of our discussion, networking again.
Speaker: Which is important.
Speaker: So that the advice would be go out, network with other people.
Speaker: As you said, Gabi, like-minded people.
Speaker: There are plenty of others who are thinking the same way as we are, as you are.
Speaker: So I think that's one thing.
Speaker: Talk about the idea.
Speaker: But also, I think what is important and in a way can't be learned, but it is, I think, a matter of mindset.
Speaker: The fact that as a social entrepreneur, it's not just a service or a product that you are on the market with.
Speaker: But you also have responsibility and care about these people.
Speaker: So usually, you know, traditional businessmen, they hire people for the money, which is exchange.
Speaker: But as a social entrepreneur, you also hire people, but it's a different type of exchange.
Speaker: relationship being hired, especially if you are coming from the marginalized or vulnerable group of people.
Speaker: So this responsibility towards these people, I think it's a huge motivational factor for social entrepreneurs to try more, to do more, to be persistent, to be stubborn, to do whatever is needed to be able to provide longer the opportunity for marginalized, excluded people.
Speaker: Any final thoughts?
Speaker: I would just like to add a fact that I think Lukas mentioned that he closed one business.
Speaker: So it's also, if you don't succeed from the first time, don't be afraid to try again and again.
Speaker: There are business people, there are entrepreneurs who failed many times.
Speaker: So it is kind of a,
Speaker: Learning by doing, it is also sometimes necessary to fail to be able to learn out of it.
Speaker: Yes, and related to that, that's a process.
Speaker: So you can't really put yourself idea together with a business model and then that's the key to success.
Speaker: But you have to, as you say, Andrea, try out different formats or pieces of models or pieces of structures and then you work your way towards establishing your project together.
Speaker: That obviously sometimes includes failures or dead ends.
Speaker: Andrea, Gabi, thank you so much for participating.
Speaker: Before we finish, I would like to let you with a reflection.
Speaker: I heard the word failure and fear multiple times in this episode.
Speaker: So what do you think is the role of failure for entrepreneurship?
Speaker: And what is the role that fear plays on it?
Speaker: I would let you thinking about it.
Speaker: And for the next episode, I'm going to come up with a short explanation of my experience with fear failure in the context of entrepreneurship.
Speaker: Until then, be well.
