Patricia Letayf: Unlocking The Power Of Refugee Communities

[00:00:02] This podcast is a Royfield Brown production. Find others on iTunes. Instead of helping companies shrink, I wanted to help them grow. In twin weeks I never leave serendipity to chance. Mobilizing people is only useful if you can channel it to influence institutions. If I want to change that person's mind, it's much more useful for me to find a way to have a one-on-one conversation with them. And then that becomes this positive loop. I wasn't even the smartest kid in my neighborhood.

[00:00:29] One death is a tragedy 10,000 is a statistic. But I was hungry. I was really hungry. I'm Greg Satell, author of Mapping, Innovation, and Cascades. And I'm with Roifield Brown, Magisa. Hey, Roifield. Hello, Greg. And hi to everyone else. This is the Changemaker Mindset podcast, where we're building a community to make positive impacts on the world. And we hope you'll join us.

[00:00:57] If you have a question for us, send us an email at questions at changemakermindset.net. Tell us where you're from and we'll answer it in a future episode. And make sure you give us a five-star review. Even if you hate Roifield, leave us a review so we know how we're doing. And it really helps others find us. So make it five stars. Speaking of five stars, how are you doing, Roifield? Are you having a five-star day?

[00:01:25] Oh, you know what? Greg, I've just been nominated anonymously for somebody for a local area, a jewellery quarter award. So that's made me feel rather chipper. Oh, wow. Things seem pretty exciting over there in Birmingham. It's good that back here in America, things are fairly uneventful. Normal everyday times with not much in the news to talk about.

[00:01:51] I don't know if the Canadians would say if it's normal everyday times. I think they're queuing up to become the 51st state. The Greenlanders are also queuing up to become the 52nd state. I don't know if I'll quite call it ordinary times. You're a reactionary, Roifield. But our next guest, I think, is somebody who's going to really excite you because she turns a lot of what people think they know on its head.

[00:02:18] So when we think about refugees, we tend to think about people who are poor, who are suffering, who are uneducated, the great unwashed that need our charity. But Patricia Lateef and her partner, Alice Bosley, what they realized after actually working with refugee communities is that many refugees are highly skilled.

[00:02:48] They're college professors, they're pharmacists, they're doctors who just got displaced by a war or a famine or something. And what they figured out was that instead of just giving charity to refugees, you can enable them with the skills to start businesses. Just like your bar, Roifield. They could probably even help you. I need a bit of help. I need a bit of help.

[00:03:15] Then there's no need to wait. Here comes Patricia Lateef right now. Hey, Patricia. Good to see you. Nice to see you. Thank you for having me. It's been a few years. You've done a lot of things. One of them was get married. But maybe you could just explain what you're doing right now, because I always thought the idea of 5-1 Labs was just amazing.

[00:03:43] When people think about refugees or people who are escaping conflict, they always think of them as the great unwashed. And the countries that they go to, the questions people ask is always about what the burden is. Who's going to pay for them? What kind of benefits are they going to get? And who's going to pay for those benefits?

[00:04:07] Where it seems to me you and your founder, Alice, asked a completely different question, which is, what skills do they have? How can we harness those skills to enrich the countries that they go and the people around them? And what you found was that many of these people were not great unwashed. They were a pharmacist or a college professor who had a bomb fall on their house and needed to go somewhere else.

[00:04:35] So could you tell us a little bit about that idea and where it stands now? Yeah, absolutely, Greg. So Alice and I, Alice, my co-founder, we have been thinking a lot about how to reshape narratives around refugees. Because as you've said, there was a perception that refugees are burdens or beneficiaries. But really, we know that this is not the case.

[00:05:01] In 2016, 2017, Alice and I were in graduate school. And at the time, it was the height of the refugee crisis in the Middle East. You had conflicts happening in Syria and Iraq. And there were record numbers of refugees and displaced individuals, whether they were displaced from one country into another, making them a refugee or displaced within their own country, making them internally displaced.

[00:05:29] And we were thinking a lot about how can we address the challenges facing displaced individuals and enable them to rebuild and thrive. So we know that refugees often face challenges to rebuilding, whether it's because they don't have access to legal status in the country where they're moving to. They don't have access to networks. They lose their financing. Or as you mentioned, they might lose their certification.

[00:05:57] So maybe in Syria, they were a pharmacist. But they end up displaced in Europe. And they're a day laborer, for example, because they can't work as a pharmacist or a doctor. So we thought really about how to harness the potential of these individuals to enable them to thrive. And what we thought about was using entrepreneurship to support these individuals.

[00:06:20] So we thought entrepreneurship is a perfect way to harness the skills that they have, the skills, the experience, and help them launch a business so that they can rebuild. So with that... Just stop right there because remember Alice and I were... If I can remind you, Alice grew up just the next town away from me. So we got to have lunch where we both grew up. And this was fairly soon after Mapping Innovation came out.

[00:06:48] You guys molded this entrepreneurship program, which would have been best in class at any university in America. Of course, many universities have programs like I-Corps. And your program was based on best in class of them, but targeted towards refugees in, I believe it was Kurdistan, the city of Erbil in Iraq. Yeah, that's right.

[00:07:17] So the solution that we came up with was an incubator program. So this was the service that we offered. And for us, an incubator was really important because it basically met the needs of our core community in many ways. First and foremost, to enable them to become entrepreneurs and to launch their own businesses, their startups. They were receiving many hours of training from us in design thinking, lean startup methodology, business management.

[00:07:47] And this training is really important. But the reason an incubator is so special is the training is just one part of it. So we all know that it takes a village to support an entrepreneur and to build the business. So the training is one component for us. And we spent many hours and a lot of time, Alice especially, she's the brainchild behind the curriculum, researching how to develop this curriculum, which is our IP, our value proposition.

[00:08:15] But what was important to us is not just the skills building, but the community and the ecosystem, because we want to make impact in these other ways. One of the challenges that displaced individuals face is they're often not integrated in their community.

[00:08:30] And so for us, we launched a co-working space so that all of our entrepreneurs, whether they're from the local community or they're displaced and newcomers, can come to one space, attend events, speak with each other, have access to other resources. We offer mentors, access to CEOs. So it's really a holistic program. And finally, at the end of the program, we also offer access to seed funding to some of the top entrepreneurs.

[00:08:58] But in order, as you alluded to in your question, to ensure that the programs are sensitive to the context that we're working in, we did a number of things. For example, we provide different types of stipends and financial support. So if you're a mom or a dad and you have children and you aren't able to come to the program without child care support, we offer financial support. So you can maybe have a nanny or send your child to daycare, for example.

[00:09:25] And what we're doing now, six, seven, eight years on, is we're adopting our program to better meet the needs of the communities we work in. So, for instance, we are shortening the number of sessions per week. It used to be a full-time program over the course of three months, which is a big commitment. A lot of the entrepreneurs in our programs might have a job on the side to help them support themselves. So we're tightening the curriculum, doing more virtual offerings and things like that to adapt as the situations change.

[00:09:55] Patricia, I'm just going to jump in because it really strikes me that you set up an organization which is almost autobiographical because you're of Lebanese heritage. And the Lebanese are one of the most mercantilial, if that's even a right word, entrepreneurial, shall we say, of all diasporas. Yes. So this organization is really informed by your own personal family story, isn't it?

[00:10:23] Absolutely, it is. And I won't push back on the entrepreneurial nature of the Lebanese. Maybe other diasporas will dispute that they're more entrepreneurial. But I think from the personal standpoint, my experience, my family definitely shaped my desire to work in this space. I think my family, much of it is still in the Middle East. And we know this is a region very much impacted by conflict as we see what's going on now in Palestine and Lebanon.

[00:10:51] But my parents themselves came to the U.S. and Canada at the time of the Civil War. And you had a large Lebanese diaspora in the 70s, 80s because of the conflict. And I consider my family to be one of the luckier ones. I had the opportunity to go to attend a good university, to grow up safely in the U.S. And for me, this is a realization that it's an opportunity that not everyone has. And so from a personal standpoint, it was something I cared a lot about.

[00:11:21] Offering opportunity to rebuild, thrive, re-skill to others. So this is a little bit what motivated me personally in terms of 5.1 Labs. And especially when it came to starting out in the Middle East. I want to slightly play devil's advocate here.

[00:11:38] Yeah. So invariably, people who leave their mother country for whatever reason, whether it's through war or economic reasons, etc., invariably are the ones who are the most driven. And I think Greg made an excellent point that invariably how it's framed in the West is that we're not necessarily getting the best of people if they're refugees, economic or war-torn or political, etc., etc.

[00:12:06] Where invariably these are people who really are striving. Isn't there an argument to say that we should try and get them not necessarily to go back, to economically, to put something back into those mother countries when they are established and after maybe 5.1 Labs has helped them to become established?

[00:12:29] It's your question, Brayfield, in terms of, for example, we expanded and are operating to Colombia and work with a number of Venezuelan migrants. So is the argument that maybe the Venezuelan migrant in Colombia should be sending remittances back to Venezuela or that they should be contributing more to the economy? You know what? I'm playing devil's advocate and bearing in mind, and that's a really tricky example on their calendar in Venezuela, the economic collapse in Venezuela.

[00:12:59] But as somebody who comes from a diaspora community, the Jamaican one. Yeah. And Jamaicans are seen as being very entrepreneurial in places like New York, Florida, Toronto, etc. And remittances is a big part of the Jamaican economy. Our fourth prime minister of Jamaica was actually a Lebanese Jamaican, Edward Siaga. So the Lebanese and the Jamaicans go hand in hand with this whole diaspora thing. I'll answer the question however you want to. But I think it's utterly fascinating.

[00:13:29] Yeah, I think what's interesting is the perception and then what the data show, for example. So let's take Colombia because we have data from a few years ago. The Colombian government took steps to regularize. I'm doing regularize and finger quotes for those who can't see the video. They provided protected status to displaced Venezuelans, which was seen as a big step in terms of regularizing and providing more rights to Venezuelans.

[00:13:57] I think the data from a few years ago showed that 90% of Venezuelans in Colombia are employed, but fewer than 20% are actually employed at their skill level. And they're right now providing 2% or 3% of the tax revenue in Colombia. There are many perceptions about refugees or migrants or newcomers, but I think a lot of the data show that they're contributing a lot to the economy.

[00:14:23] And to your point about the entrepreneurial nature of immigrant communities, I think it shows that they're hustlers when they come to a new place because they have to be. And they're working in jobs that are not ones that they may have worked in their country, but they're making ends meet, supporting their families and likely supporting families that are still at home, whether it's Jamaica or Venezuela or Lebanon.

[00:14:45] So just building off of what we feel the point he was getting at, there's two books that I always think are very interesting because there's a long history of this question. How do you create an entrepreneurial community? And a friend of mine, Annalise Saxenian, she was a sociologist at Berkeley.

[00:15:08] She started in the 1980s and her major research area was the sociology of Silicon Valley. And she wrote a fairly well-known book called Regional Advantage. And it was all about how the more vertically driven technology ring around Boston eventually gave way to the more network driven Silicon Valley. And that book was a big success.

[00:15:36] But then she took the research a step further and said, all these immigrants, some refugees or whatever, went to go work in Silicon Valley and they learned skills and they made some money. And then a lot of them went back to their home countries and started new tech hubs in places like Taipei and Bangalore and Tel Aviv.

[00:16:06] We talk about the work you do, which is it's a nonprofit. Could you talk to us a little bit about the funding and where it comes from and who's really passionate about building these entrepreneurial communities in places like Kurdistan in Iraq or Colombia?

[00:16:27] Yeah, I think I'll answer that question maybe in two sentences and then I'll dive into the who's interested in building ecosystems because I think the funder and the interest are two disparate things. But in terms of our business model, like you mentioned, Greg, we are a nonprofit. So we're receiving funds and raising funds from bilateral, multilateral donors in Iraq.

[00:16:51] So in the post-conflict context, after the fall, again, fall and finger quotes of the Islamic State, there were many countries, whether the German government, U.S. and USAID funding, etc., who were funding initiatives related to rebuilding. And so we were able to access funds from these types of organizations who are interested in building up the private sector, for example, who are interested in supporting communities that needed extra support.

[00:17:19] And in Colombia, where we've been operating for about two years, we access different types of funding, largely from foundations, many based in the U.S., some in Europe. So there's interest from donors in various spaces. Some donors support our program. Some donors like to support policy work so that we can have impact in shaping policy related to startups. So it's very different.

[00:17:43] In terms of the ecosystem question, I love this theory that you're giving because I think we know for places like Boston, Silicon Valley, there's a strong education system, right? So you're getting a pool of founders that are coming out, graduating from these universities. And I think what's been interesting for us, I'll take Iraq and our work in the Kurdistan region because we were the first incubator in the country.

[00:18:06] And so it's a chicken and egg situation because we were there and we also view ourselves not just as an incubator, but as an ecosystem builder. Because as we were discussing before, it takes a lot to support a startup. It's not just us as 5.1 Labs providing training. Here's a certificate. Off you go. No. What happens when you're done? You're an incubator. You need to have access to funding. Where are the investors in Iraq? Where are the venture funds?

[00:18:34] What happens when you're ready to scale? Where's the accelerator? All of these types of things. What happens with the policy environment if the government is not prioritizing entrepreneurship? So we've been innovating, iterating, adapting as our entrepreneurs also scale their businesses and need more services. So we're there also to build an ecosystem.

[00:18:57] And to your point about entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley selling their businesses and coming back to support the ecosystem, we've had some cases like that in Iraq where we had entrepreneurs who were Iraqi who were in the diaspora, for example, or working at startups in the Middle East. And their startups got bought out. They're coming back to Iraq and supporting. So we, like, the ecosystem is evolving.

[00:19:22] And to compare to our work in Colombia, Colombia has a really well-developed ecosystem across the country. They have unicorns. There's a number of incubators, accelerators. But for us, we're building a community in the city of Barranquilla. So we're very localized there. But we have access to a lot of different types of support and ecosystem players that weren't there in Iraq slowly, but surely we're building up.

[00:19:48] I think that's really fascinating what you said, because one of the things you said earlier before, which I completely and utterly agree with, is that people from immigrant communities or refugee communities invariably are good entrepreneurs because they have to hustle. They're trying to figure out a new country, a new economy, and they have to start from the bottom.

[00:20:09] And I'm always interested in the overlap between a hustler, an entrepreneur, and a business person, because I don't think I'm actually a business person. That, to me, is another layer of you have kind of a network kind of gravitas or whatever. And you've spoken about understanding regulatory frameworks in places like Iraq. But how do you build up personal capacity and resilience, et cetera?

[00:20:35] And tell us about those things which you offer, tapping into various funds. In terms of the programs that we run, we have multiple of them. Our core one is our startup incubator. So it's a three-month program that takes an entrepreneur from idea to launch.

[00:20:56] So whether your idea is a solar panel company or an AI agriculture-focused business, we help you launch your business. So you'll come to us just with your own idea, and we help you kickstart. And in terms of the skills that you build, we do a lot of design thinking, lean startup methodology to enable our entrepreneurs to think creatively and adapt their businesses.

[00:21:22] We are also teaching a lot of business skills, because, Roy Field, one of the challenges we've seen is that, or it's not a challenge, it's an opportunity, let's say, is we have a lot of really creative entrepreneurs who join our program, but they might not know how to build a financial model. They might be doing their books or finances on a sheet of paper and don't know how to write up a business plan. So we're giving those concrete skills. We're also teaching them a lot about management. How do you hire your first employee?

[00:21:52] How do you do a performance review? How do you negotiate? So it's meant to be a very holistic experience, but it's not just about the training. Like I said, in our co-working space, the entrepreneurs have access to events and other community members because we want them to be able to build their networks. So this is very much at the programmatic level, and we provide access to funding. But I think in an incubator, we're able to have impact on a business-by-business level.

[00:22:20] One thing we also think about is if you level up a notch is about the ecosystem, the policy framework. So in our work in the Middle East, for example, we're thinking a lot about how can we enable the reform of the business environment to enable impact across more startups. So we can have impact for the startups that join our incubator, which might be 15 to 17 startups per program.

[00:22:46] But if we're able to help more startups register their businesses or better understand legal frameworks, we have a broader impact. So one thing we've worked a lot on is developing a series of recommendations for the Kurdistan government, for example, about what reforms they can make to things like the registration process, access to banking services, taxation, incentives for entrepreneurs.

[00:23:13] Because if those get passed, it impacts everyone, not just the 100 or 150 startups that are in an incubator each year. So we're taking the support across many levels. And then additionally, we run programs for a lot of other different types of individuals who might not be ready for an incubator. For example, it's important that at the university level, Greg, you alluded to these courses and universities. It's important for us to have a pipeline of young people.

[00:23:42] So we run a lot of programs and short trainings in universities to get people excited. Maybe in five years, they'll join our incubator. We provide support for a lot of female founders. And this is something Alice and I have always cared immensely about, given we were two female founders ourselves. So we work with our female founders program or FEM, as it's called in Colombia, to support women-led enterprises who are scaling. And that's something really important.

[00:24:10] So we're trying to provide holistic support across the ecosystem. There's too much to do and not enough time. You have, I think most people who hear about 5-1 Labs, and we met at a conference, and I know this was the overwhelming feeling, was like that your idea is one of those rare ideas that is both good and righteous.

[00:24:34] Good meaning an insightful idea and also righteous 100% on the side of the good. And what I warn people about with ideas that are both good and righteous is that the righteousness of your cause will not save you. You will run into stiff resistance. And I know that was true in Erbil, especially with regard to trust issues.

[00:25:01] Can you talk to us a little bit about the resistance you had both in Iraq and also in Colombia? And were those the same or were they different? Yeah, I think that's a really good question because I think in Iraq we launched, we started running pilots in 2016, 2017. And the environment was a lot different than it was now.

[00:25:23] So because we were, I would say, firstly, it was a post-conflict context, in some respects still active conflict. So it was a very challenging environment. And we also, as the first movers, we had to figure out how to tell our story and tell people about this is the impact entrepreneurship can have. There are millions of entrepreneurs in Iraq, business people, as Roy Field mentioned.

[00:25:48] But at the beginning, there were challenges in terms of us, for example, hosting a pitch event and entrepreneurs not necessarily wanting to share their ideas in front of an audience because of, like you mentioned, trust issues. If I tell Greg my idea, he's going to steal it and go run the business or start it himself. And you have a lot of entrenched political interests in the country, political interests that are involved in business sectors at the time.

[00:26:19] So it's not surprising. Especially with regard to import-export as businesses. In general, we know that there are interests involved in various sectors. So if I start a business in this sector, I don't know if I'll be able to run it. Things have changed a bit. So from that perspective, it was building trust, not only in terms of what does entrepreneurship means. It means getting up there, pitching your idea, getting feedback, taking it into consideration, sharing with others. And now there's pitch events.

[00:26:47] A lot of people are sharing their ideas. The culture has changed a lot. It's hard to measure. I hope we had a big impact in that, but we can clearly see it in terms of how many messages we get on Instagram and LinkedIn saying, oh, can you help me launch my business? Before it was like, we're here to help you launch your business. So it's... And what would you say was the key thing you did to start building that trust?

[00:27:09] Because I know having spent a lot of time in developing places myself, people immediately want to know what's in it for you. Yeah. And you can't possibly actually want to help me. Yeah. I'll say in Iraq and Colombia, it was a similar strategy in a sense that firstly, we wanted people to trust us individually because of course, neither Alice nor I is Iraqi or from the Kurdistan region.

[00:27:38] We had both spent a lot of time in these places. But what that meant was there would be a lot of FaceTime from us. So Alice moved to the Kurdistan region after we graduated from our master's. We ran a lot of shorter boot camps and events to show our faces, to increase our brand name. But the most important part of that was that we built trusted partners. So for example, universities with good reputations, we said to them, hey, can we come host this event?

[00:28:07] So we did that over and over again, these pipeline activities. And we've done the same in Colombia in terms of building partnerships, whether it's with local incubators, the Chamber of Commerce, organizations serving, providing services to migrants or refugees. I think the other important thing was we hired a great team. 5.1 Labs is nothing without our team on the ground because they're amazing. They're really skilled. They have a good network. They know the community. This is their community.

[00:28:37] And so I hope that the teams that we have, whether it's Barranquilla or Beal, Soleimani, reflect the communities that we work in. So there's that inherent element of trust there. But building your reputation takes a lot of time. And now, of course, you have some because up to this point, we've talked mainly about process, but there's been real impact. I imagine that that goes a lot to building trust.

[00:29:05] The one that sticks in my mind is Mosul Solar because that is Mosul not so long ago was a place where you wouldn't expect to hear good things. And that seems to me to be a success story. And then I think you'll have one or two others as well. Maybe you can, before we wrap up, tell us about them. My favorite question.

[00:29:28] And I would encourage anyone who's listening, if you're interested in hearing about our startups, we have a page on our website that features our startups. So you can hear or read the stories of all of the businesses. But to touch on first one of the startups that you mentioned, Mosul Solar, it is a company providing solar panels and solar energy in Mosul, which was very much at the center of the conflict with the Islamic State.

[00:29:56] And Mohammed joined our incubator program. He himself is from Mosul. He joined our Arabic language incubator program and was one of the top businesses. Incubator received funding from us to help him kickstart his business. And now he's providing amazing services in Mosul. The city lived through a lot of darkness under ISIS.

[00:30:21] And so for him, it was really launching this business to bring light to the city that he loved so much. And in 2020, he was able to start doing that. And he's been building up his business ever since. So it's a great success story from us because I suppose to Rory Field's point, you know, he came to the Kurdistan region, which is just, you know, the cities, Erbil and Mosul are not that far apart. To join our program and then went back to Mosul to launch his business.

[00:30:49] So it's a great success story. And he was ahead of the game in terms of solar energy in Iraq. And now there's more and more businesses like this. He's one of our great entrepreneurs. And to give you an example from Colombia, where I was in Barranquilla with our team a few weeks ago, where we had the demo day for our second incubator. And we had a number of amazing startups. And some of the top winners, I'll give one of my favorite ones.

[00:31:17] The startup is called Imponente. And the founder, Yoseline, is from Venezuela. And she developed a business, a lingerie business for women who are of different shapes and sizes. I won't say to the men in the room how uncomfortable a bra can be. I don't know if you do know. I don't want to know, actually. But I am. There was a Seinfeld episode about that.

[00:31:42] So Yoseline developed a business for a product for women who might have disabilities or difficulty wearing traditional lingerie. And she, again, she hustled. She did an amazing job, developed a product in a really short period of time. And we hope that the seed funding we provided her will really help. She's a newcomer to Colombia. So for her to succeed is really amazing. And we only hope that we can support dozens and hundreds more startups like that.

[00:32:12] And you hustled, too, because your journey, you grew up in New Hampshire. You went to a very good school, then a graduate program. You spent, I think, the interim time as an analyst. And you had this idea. And you got it funded. And to make it work, you had to really get your hands dirty. You had to go to places that weren't stable, weren't always safe.

[00:32:40] And here it is, what's it, eight years later. And you've made an enormous impact on two continents. So our last question is always, what have you learned in your journey that you could give as advice to other maybe aspiring changemakers who maybe are in some graduate program somewhere and have an idea? Absolutely. Absolutely.

[00:33:06] I think, first and foremost, I need to say it's a team effort because it was not me alone. It was Alice. It was our first team members. But I think for us, you always have to stay true to your purpose. And that was the number one thing for us. And knowing that change would be slow at the beginning and continuing to persist, it was really important for us because you'll go through a lot of challenges. And we've had a lot of difficult times.

[00:33:33] We've had a lot of obstacles externally, whether they were weather-related, political-related. Anything and everything has gone wrong. And it feels terrible. But if you persist, you know that you're having an impact. And for me, I was working with Alice. But I was always remote. I never was living in Iraq or living in Colombia. So it was so important to make sure to connect with the entrepreneurs. I'll maybe end with an anecdote from our demo day last week.

[00:34:02] We, as you mentioned, Greg, we launched 5.1 Labs while we were at graduate school in Colombia. And we came in first place in a pitch competition. So we ourselves have gone through this ideation process. And Alice and I and our third co-founder, Sophia, won a $15,000 check, a $15,000 grant from the university. And there was a photo of us holding this check. And our team put up this photo at our demo day in Barranquilla a few weeks ago.

[00:34:30] And I hadn't looked at that picture in years. And when the first place winner, who's the owner of a business called Petfly, he came up to me. He won $15,000. He came up to me after the announcement. He said, look at what you did with $15,000. And I can't believe it. Like, you've come all this way just with $15,000. And he said, and I'm going to give this back to you.

[00:34:55] And that was so moving because you don't really think about your humble beginnings often. Or I never thought that picture would motivate someone to act. But it's true. You start with something so small and it can grow so big. I think if you asked us seven, eight years ago or told us we'd given out dozens of $15,000 checks after having only received one, we never would have believed you. But it's definitely persistence and purpose. You are definitely a gift, Patricia.

[00:35:25] Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you both. It was a pleasure to be with you. Pleasure meeting you. So what did I tell you? Patricia's pretty great. Lovely woman. Really enjoyed speaking to her. Yeah. And it's really amazing what she's done. When you think about Mosul, you don't normally think of solar energy companies.

[00:35:54] No, not at all. That was really powerful for me because Patricia really sees entrepreneurship as a way of empowering communities, specifically displaced people. And that is just a wonderful spin on the way that we normally see those people as downtrodden and hopeless. But no, she's actually brought real social change to those communities.

[00:36:19] What else impressed me is that they understand it's not just about entrepreneurship. Isn't just about ideas. It's not just giving them the skills or them putting in the hard work, but also helping them build communities that can cross-pollinate ideas and that can help each other, which is really exactly how Silicon Valley started. Absolutely. So individual success isn't enough.

[00:36:48] It's building that whole kind of ecosystem, that community around it, and building and improving business environments. And collaboration is at the heart of everything which you talked about. Yeah. And one thing I can say is the world is definitely better for having people like Patricia in it. So I'm glad that you were suitably impressed.

[00:37:11] But hold on, because our next episode, I'm going to introduce you to my friend Talia Milgram Elkop. Goodness. I'm sat here waiting with vated breath. She's going to have to go some way to top good old Patricia. But again, Greg, you bring great guests onto this show. And I've said this once, so this is hardly a joke, hardly a unique thought. How they ever associate with you, heaven only knows. But Patricia, lovely soul. I'm sure Talia, likewise.

[00:37:42] Thanks for tuning in to Changemaker Mindset. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe, leave us a review, and follow us on social media to stay updated on all the latest episodes. Your support helps us bring more insightful conversations to the table.

[00:37:57] And don't miss out on our next episode, where we'll be chatting with Talia Milgram Elkop, the founder and executive director of Beyond 100K, a nonprofit dedicated to preparing and retaining 150,000 excellent STEM teachers. Until then, keep making change happen.