What is the name of your organization?
Respond Crisis Translation
What is the name of your solution?
Inclusion Beyond Borders
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
We offer digital, borderless professionalization in language services for marginalized refugee and migrant communities.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
RCT is based in San Francisco, CA. However, our team is global. Our leadership team has ties to multiple countries in the Global North and Global South.
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
USA
What type of organization is your solution team?
Nonprofit
Film your elevator pitch.
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What specific problem are you solving?
Globalization, characterized by the free movement of goods, services, and capital, has largely failed to benefit marginalized populations such as refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants, and displaced persons. Unlike individuals in the Global North, these communities face systemic barriers that hinder their ability to achieve financial and professional stability. As of the end of 2023, the UNHCR estimated 117.3 million people were forcibly displaced due to conflict, persecution, and human rights violations—a number likely to surpass 120 million by April 2024. Many of these individuals lack legal status, work permits, or documentation, preventing them from contributing their talents to the global economy. In our work as a language services provider, we regularly witness the urgent need for interpreters of marginalized languages, particularly in humanitarian crises. Our proposed solution seeks to empower displaced individuals by creating pathways for them to use their linguistic and cultural skills. This initiative not only promotes economic inclusion and justice but also strengthens workforce development by tapping into an underutilized pool of skilled workers. By recognizing and integrating the capabilities of displaced populations, we can help bridge global inequities and foster more inclusive economic systems.
What is your solution?
We are a community of linguists and activists that advocate for language justice in all contexts, while focusing on humanitarian contexts. We work from digital platforms and we make use of a stack of technologies allowing us to provide scalable and efficient language services that also make a deep impact in humanitarian efforts. We use a combination of different technological platforms and software such as Softr (our portal), Airtable (for back-end), Ring Central, and Slack. In 2024, we unveiled our portal which has allowed us to integrate more streamlined and effective workflows to our internal processes. Furthermore, our portal has provided us with the logistical capabilities to onboard and manage linguists - faster and manage more of them with ease. We have launched a partner-facing portal, which allows full tracking and traceability of projects, and will soon manage the whole workflow from source document, via translation and proof-reading by our global linguists, to delivery of the certified translation. We are constantly evolving and constantly looking for software and other digital tools that can help us advance our mission, ensuring continued professional development for our workforce.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Our solution serves marginalized communities – refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, people in movement anywhere they may be, and speakers of marginalized languages – who are looking for professional employment opportunities. Currently, these communities can face obstacles in leveraging their talent and in their human right to pursue professional development opportunities. Furthermore, our solution also provides them with an avenue to secure dignified wages that may otherwise not be available to them. We use a variety of borderless and mobile payment solutions to ensure they can get paid on the move, and provide stipends to support them with laptops, eSIMs for mobile data and more. Our solution could be for a displaced Arabic speaker in Lebanon, or Dari and Pashto speakers in Pakistan, or Haitian Creole speakers in Mexico who lack the necessary legal documents to be able to hold professional positions in the countries where they may live, respectively. Over the years, we’ve learned and confirmed that these communities are made up of supremely talented people who want to contribute to the world in which they live but are not able to due to archaic or unjust laws.