Yassmin’s Story

by Yassmin Abdel-Magied

  What mattered most was that they believed in YWB as much as I did; and a strong belief is vital when you’re building something from scratch – attending six-hour meetings every week, coming up with objectives and fundraising plans, and debating the structure of the organisation. I don’t know whether Lucy or Anthony – or even I – knew what we were getting into, but we believed in it, particularly when it started taking shape. My main recommendation to people who are launching a new organisation is to find people who believe in it just as much as you do. Not only will they bring different skills and perspectives to the table, but you can support each other through the tough times. It’s also so much more fun with a team – partners in crime, fighting the good fight!

  Our first project was the epitome of how we would work: haphazard, online, and on the smell of an oily rag, but somehow effective in the long term. One of the participants at the summit was Fathima, a fifteen-year-old girl from Depok, a city in Indonesia, and she had mentioned that she didn’t have access to a public library. That had resonated with me, so when we had our first face-to-face YWB meeting, I pitched it as a possible option for our first project. Maybe we could set up a library in Indonesia!

  It was tricky. We had no money, no direction and no reliable line to anyone in Indonesia. Fathima was only periodically able to check her email due to limited access to the internet. All we had was gumption.

  Lucy was the main point of contact with Fathima, as she had worked to secure her position in the conference, and I set about finding ways to connect with other people in Indonesia. I emailed, randomly, various people I could find online until my mother suggested I contact someone who had links to the Australian Government.

  I am not sure how those first emails must have sounded, but judging from my diary entries at the time, they probably weren’t the most sophisticated pieces of writing. Genuine, yes. Nuanced? Hardly.

  The government official with whom we made contact didn’t know how we could make the library happen, but he suggested other organisations that could help and those were all the leads we needed. We collaborated with a large, student-based organisation in Indonesia, PPSDMS, to come up with a proposal. However, after we got it translated from Bahasa to English, we realised a few things. Firstly, that the idea we’d come up with was slightly different from what they proposed, but that their solution worked for them. Then we found out that they had forged ahead and started the project without our help! I also became aware there was so much that we hadn’t thought about, down to what language the library books would need to be in. I thanked Allah for our local partners and mentally slapped myself for being just as bad as those well-intentioned-but-misguided-saviour-types my father constantly derided.

  We set about fundraising for the project, named Kamar Buku (The Book Room, in Bahasa) through barbecues and concerts, but we were nowhere near as successful as we expected to be, and in the end our partners in Indonesia got the entire system donated to them – the motorbikes, the boxes fitted to the back of the motorbikes and the books – while we were still trying to raise money. In fact, while we were freaking out because we hadn’t heard from them in a few months, they were getting things done their own way. It turned out phone calls were expensive and their internet wasn’t fast enough or reliable enough to Skype, but one day, over a year after we had had our first conversation with them, we received a twelve-minute video, mainly in Bahasa, that showed our project had come alive. The video, which is still on YouTube, followed the motorbike as it travelled through the villages, and showed the volunteers sitting with classes full of children, reading to them and sharing stories. The young Indonesian students were clearly full of joy, their worlds broadened. It was hard to believe we had had a part in this at all, but it had actually happened and the evidence was in front of our eyes.

  Kamar Buku became our showcase of how you could run community initiatives through project-based collaboration. Our most important realisation was that we didn’t have to be there on the ground, as we weren’t the important ones in the equation. Our role was about acting as a catalyst and empowering other young people to realise they could create the change they needed.

  That momentum took us through the first few years of YWB. There were plenty of other little projects along the way. We put on small concerts, although we always forgot to advertise. We developed partnership programs and set up school holiday camps for young refugees and asylum seekers. We ran sports programs like a Ramadan football tournament for the African boys in the Brisbane community, and organised Shinpads and Hijabs, the fantastic collaboration with Football United where we worked with the Islamic College of Brisbane and all the girls in high school, teaching them how to play football. The awesome twist was that ladies from the Matildas and the Vikings (our national futsal team) got involved in coaching, and the Muslim girls began to see soccer as something they could do, and be quite competitive in! We supported other young people who wanted to start their own projects. One Moon was a project to send sanitary products overseas to women in East Africa. One Hope fundraised for the Haiti earthquake. Masterchef Meets the Streets was a cross-cultural awareness program where we worked with high school students from high socio-economic areas and taught them how to cook dishes from culturally and linguistically diverse communities, while explaining the cultural significance behind the food. It was then shared with people at the local homeless shelters. All of these projects, and many more, were only possible because we partnered with others. We didn’t have the money, capacity or knowledge to do it all ourselves; collaboration was the only way.

  People often asked us what our specific cause was, but at the time we had no language to describe the concepts we were working with – youth empowerment, access to opportunity, and becoming leaders of positive change.

  I was on the money that day at the forum when I realised the different organisations needed to do more to collaborate, but it was a much bigger problem than I could have ever anticipated and we didn’t quite have the sophistication to tackle the structural problem it was and continues to be. In late 2015, the Community Council for Australia’s chief executive officer, David Crosbie, publicly asked organisations to combine and pool their resources, eight years after we had said the same thing. We had been seen as purely idealistic. It will be interesting to see if Crosbie’s push has traction.

  YWB’s focus has shifted to a slightly different area – using collaboration to get young people to realise their full potential. We still occupy the same ideological space but aim to get individuals working together, rather than organisations. Originally, we aimed to tackle long-term, deep-rooted issues. We wanted to influence organisations and create alternative models for philanthropy, rather than just the hands-on activities – those that people are often drawn to and that garner more immediate, tangible results. But we found that it was difficult to attract other teenagers to agitate for this kind of structural change.

  The slight shift in mission also brought with it an increased focus on the idea of ‘young leaders’ of positive change. However, the concept of leadership seemed icky to me, conjuring up an image of people forcing their way to the front, demanding to be a leader, when I wanted us to be humble facilitators of change. I wonder now where that distaste for the word ‘leadership’ came from. Perhaps from my parents drumming the religious concept of humility into me. Islam is about being humble, communal, not focused on oneself. Maybe I was compensating because I was a confident, loud person who was often up the front, happy to volunteer and be the centre of attention, but being focused on getting attention has unIslamic connotations. With maturity comes understanding. My focus these days is on the intention behind my actions and in executing that in the most authentic way possible.

  It may be that my distaste for leadership came from some anti-authoritarian streak. Being a leader seemed to imply following the rules, which I didn’t always like doing. I liked setting rules for myself based on what I felt was important, which was often my own combination of Easter
n and Western values. As the years have gone by, the organisation and I have become more comfortable with the concept of leadership. Perhaps this is because we have matured and realised that leading is the business we are in, creating leaders from diverse backgrounds who can guide their communities, young people who feel empowered – leaders who realise that sometimes the best way to take charge is to follow, the best way to communicate is to listen and the best way to empower others is to let them do something themselves. I don’t know if the word leadership inherently implies all of that, but that is what it means to me.

  It certainly isn’t always an easy process. Something else that I was forced to learn along the way was that people have different reasons for getting involved and for caring, and not everyone’s intention is altruistic. Once something becomes successful, people want in on it, or they want to take it from you. Leadership can also be about standing your ground, protecting what you know is good and being prepared to back yourself.

  Chapter 16:

  Failing, Learning and Finding the Spark

  Running Youth Without Borders wasn’t always going to be a walk in the park, which became clear when a fancy fundraising dinner I had been planning completely fell apart. We made a grave mistake by not requesting payment immediately when we sold our tickets. A few days out from the event when the time came to collect the money we got apologies left, right and centre. We went from 120 confirmed attendees to thirty-five.

  The day before the dinner was a series of excruciating phone calls, starting with one to the event planner. When I ran her through the details on my way to an 8 am engineering lecture, she recommended we cancel the entire event, but I didn’t want to hear it.

  Arriving late and huffing with frustration, I slammed myself into a seat at the back of the lecture theatre next to a couple of mates, fuming, and faced with gear calculations. I was in my third-year advanced dynamics lecture, one of the most difficult mechanical engineering courses, but I couldn’t hear a single thing over the volume of my thoughts. I willed myself to focus on the importance of how to calculate the ideal gear ratios for a system, but my will wasn’t working. I needed to get out.

  I tapped a friend on the shoulder: ‘Oi, mate. Let’s bail.’ I collected my books, jumped the seat behind me and headed out. My mate followed, unaware he was about to become a punching bag.

  ‘Dude, what’s wrong?’

  As I explained the situation to him, the enormity of it became more obvious and my voice kept getting louder: ‘Oh, man, I’m going to have to cancel all these favours and we’re going to be out so many grand …’ I was getting more and more animated, totally wrapped up in the unfolding disaster.

  ‘Dude –’ He stopped me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Dude, you’re yelling. It looks like you’re breaking up with me.’

  I glanced around – we were standing in a main walkway at the university, people milling around us, staring at me as they passed. Something snapped in me and I burst into laughter; he just looked relieved that the yelling had stopped. Way to go, Yassmin, I thought. Winning every day.

  The rest of the day was a lesson in humility. I made phone calls to all the dignitaries I had invited, informing them of the late cancellation and thanking them for their contribution. I made humbling phone calls to the YWB members, musicians, and my friends and family, telling them the news.

  YWB taught me early on that we sometimes fail and make mistakes, and that it’s important to learn from them. The realisation that I couldn’t make everything work my way was a bitter pill for my teenage self to swallow, but every event has a lesson buried in it; it’s just up to us to figure out what it is.

  This time, beyond learning to collect money when you sell a ticket, the message was to remain humble. Failures like this are a huge part of being a start-up, whether it’s a company or an NGO, but we never seem to really talk about them. It’s not fun to talk about failure, but it is how we improve.

  There were a few times when things got tough, people started leaving, things didn’t turn out how I’d expected them to, and I’d contemplate just walking away, shutting up shop. There were moments in the dead of night when I asked myself why people were choosing to leave YWB and felt helpless to change it. As we were young, everyone had their life plans and sometimes YWB didn’t fit with them. People left to travel overseas, because they got a part-time job or had found another cause that resonated – the reasons weren’t personal, but I often took them that way. It took time for me to realise that this was just part of the process that had to be managed.

  A particularly rough moment came during my second year of university. I’d just turned eighteen and was overseas on my first trip by myself and the organisation started to fall apart in my absence. At this time we hadn’t yet heard about the success of Kamar Buku and a number of the long-term members had left the organisation. Meetings weren’t being held, money wasn’t being fundraised – we’d lost our momentum and I was wondering whether we should even bother to go on. Then a friend asked whether the reasons we started YWB still existed.

  ‘Yeah, of course,’ was my immediate response, ‘nothing much has changed! Everyone is still competing for funding, loads of young people don’t think they can change their communities …’ I soon realised her point: if the problem was still there, then the organisation was still needed, right? We had started it for a reason and if that reason still existed, we needed to keep it moving forwards.

  Our first real organisational breakthrough was inspired by my younger brother, who had just finished a life-changing vacation camp. The camp had kindled a love of aviation and aerospace in him, which eventually led to his mechanical and aerospace engineering career. I had been on a similar camp in grade twelve, and while chatting about it at YWB, we realised both camps were full of a very similar demographic to that of the big companies in Silicon Valley. In 2015, Google’s employees were sixty per cent white and thirty-one per cent Asian – only nine per cent were black, Hispanic or other races. In a similar vein, only thirty per cent were women, with only eighteen per cent in the technical space. The engineering camps my brother and I had gone to had comparable percentages. Also, in addition to the lack of ethnic and gender diversity, everyone at the camp was from upper- or upper-middle-class neighbourhoods and schools, partly because it was prohibitively expensive.

  When the YWB crew talked about the work we wanted to do, we realised we wanted it to be with kids who looked like us. We wanted to focus on students who faced a barrier in their life that we could help take down. Enter stage left: Spark Engineering Camp.

  I’ve been told that learning happens when we’re uncomfortable. Organising the Spark Engineering Camp was definitely one of those times – the steep learning curve and challenges I faced made me feel uncomfortable, proud and inspired, all at the same time.

  Spark has evolved to be the heart of YWB. On the surface, it’s an engineering camp for kids in grade ten to twelve run on university campuses through engineering faculties in Brisbane (University of Queensland) and Melbourne (University of Melbourne). In reality, it is an experience that empowers young people who face barriers (students who are asylum seekers, refugees, Indigenous, from low socio-economic or foster care homes and similar) to pursue further education and realise their potential. Although even that definition doesn’t capture the essence of Spark. With Spark, YWB created the space we felt was missing, a place for students who wouldn’t make it to the kind of engineering camp that Yasseen or I had gone to. Maybe they lived too far away, didn’t have the money, didn’t know about it or wouldn’t have felt comfortable there. The engineering camp I went to in high school was snow-white and while there’s nothing wrong with snow, it’s definitely not every kid’s natural habitat and can make for quite an intimidating and off-putting environment.

  YWB was keen to hire an intern through AIESEC, a large student organisation that offers international interns and internships, but we didn’t have enough money. We approached the Dean
of Engineering to see if that faculty would sponsor us. This was the first time I’d set up a meeting with the explicit purpose of asking for money, and it made me uneasy, but it was necessary for our success.

  I walked into that meeting prepped, and after a minute of small talk, launched into fifteen minutes of the hardest pitching I had done in my nineteen years. When I took my first breath, the Dean simply asked, ‘How much are you looking for?’

  He instantly gave us the seven thousand dollars we’d requested and I glided out of that room on cloud nine. Now to get the remaining twenty thousand with that same level of ease.

  Unfortunately, we weren’t so lucky with the rest. Who knew getting cash for a good cause was going to be so difficult? But in the meantime we had enough to employ ourselves an intern, so the real work of setting up the camp could begin.

  We hired a lovely Sri Lankan student who believed in the vision of Spark. She seemed perfect to me because she got why we were running the camp and shared the values of the organisation … except she had no idea how to run a camp in a foreign country. She didn’t understand the systems and we didn’t understand that she needed more support. There were mismatched expectations all round. Nobody communicated to her what was expensive and what was cheap – so we spent thousands on polo shirts and didn’t get enough butcher’s paper, for example. It was a lesson in cross-cultural differences: this was not a person who was moving to Australia and trying to integrate; this was someone who wanted to learn how to do business in Australia but who came from a completely different world.