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Lucas Welch
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Lucas Welch received an Echoing Green Fellowship in 2004 to launch Soliya, a global network of young adults and empowering them to bridge the divide between the "West" and the "Arab & Muslim World."
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Lucas Welch is the President & Founder of Soliya, an NGO that uses online technology to enable thousands of university students in the Middle East, North Africa, Europe and the United States to communicate online in real-time and collaboratively produce media.Lucas left his job as an ABC news producer to start Soliya with his business partner, Liza Chambers. Liza had worked for many years as a facilitator, bringing people together across conflict lines for intensive dialogue. Soliya uses social media and web conferencing technology to connect young people in the “West” and the “Arab & Muslim World.” The program, called the Connect Program, works within an accredited university course to link students in over 20 countries.
Once online, they collaborate in projects that deepen their understanding one another’s cultures, beliefs and political circumstances.
Soliya uses before-and-after participant surveys to measure the Connect Program’s impact by determining how much the participating students have changed in their perception of what they have in common with their peers on the other side of the computer screen and the world.
Soliya has built a volunteer network of facilitators from over 20 countries who enable the online dialogue to take place. Many of the facilitators were Connect Program participants – a kind of positive feedback loop.
Lucas’s advice to fellow social entrepreneurs: “It’s a tricky balance to maintain your dreams and have a real practical understanding of your constraints. Make contingency plans for when your dreams don’t come through as you expected, but that doesn’t mean letting go of them.”
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how do you choose content
I get the videoconferencing-facilitation aspect. But I wonder how you choose the content for these converstions. In particular, I wonder if you ever talk about religion and violence and history, and how the history of the West includes the break-up of Christianity in the 16th century, and then the massive dying in the 20th century that gave rise to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. So, the history of religion and violence in the Middle East is different than in Europe, and comparing notes about this would seem to be useful.