Soliya

Waidehi is the CEO of Soliya, a nonprofit organization that empowers young adults to engage with difference constructively and build cooperative relations within and across their communities. Waidehi sets the strategic direction, oversees global fundraising, and ensures the operational and financial well-being of Soliya. She generates awareness, collaborations, and thought leadership to amplify cross-cultural engagement as a proven, viable medium of effecting positive social change.

Prior to becoming the CEO, Waidehi held various positions within Soliya, including Director of Partnerships and Development and Senior Manager of the Connect Program, bringing unique insight into her role as CEO and informing her keen understanding of virtual exchange. Before Soliya, Waidehi worked in international development, education, and counseling psychology across myriad geographies including Singapore, India, Canada, and the United States.

Soliya addresses two problems that are related yet not often thought of together: rising global polarization, and inequitable access to international education among global youth. Limited exposure to different cultures and perspectives has been shown to deepen echo chambers and silos and in turn erode social cohesion by creating fear of ‘the other.’ A meaningful experience across difference at a formative age can foster the empathy and understanding needed to counter this fear. Operating at the intersection of peacebuilding and global education, Soliya has pioneered virtual exchange, the use of technology to connect people across the world in online, face-to-face dialogue, sustained over a period of time, for the purpose of advancing pluralistic values. We provide young adults – future leaders and current change-makers – with an opportunity to recognize each other’s humanity despite their differences, ensuring they build the skills and willingness to work across differences for social good.  

We tackle the problem of eroding social cohesion by creating opportunities for young people to engage with and understand their global peers, and in turn develop the skills to work across borders and differences to solve the interlinked challenges of the 21st Century.

According to a 2019 analysis of speeches given by world leaders from 40 countries, populist rhetoric in public addresses has doubled since 2004, with the biggest rise happening in just the last five years. As globalization and migration continue to influence and even change day-to-day scenes and interactions, some may feel as if their identity and way of life is threatened – unsure of how to deal with this, and therefore unable to see the benefits of diversity, they feel fear toward the unknown and find comfort in the idea of returning to a perceived golden age, as is promised in populist or extreme belief systems. In idealizing restrictive or patriarchal ways of life, some of these systems may threaten minority and women’s rights and empowerment.

Soliya addresses this problem of division across the globe by bringing young adults from different countries and cultures together for dialogue that builds understanding and bursts silos.

In the Connect Program, we engage college aged youth across the world, from varied socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, in online, small-group dialogue for the purpose of improving their cross-cultural understanding and global competence. We partner with professors to integrate this program into college classes and place students from these classes into international dialogue groups of 8-12 – in composing mixed dialogue groups, we ensure that the segregation that may be present in classes, colleges, or cities does not transfer into the program. Participants log into the Exchange Portal, our video-conferencing platform, to speak online and face-to-face about global, social, and personal topics in the presence of trained facilitators.

 Facilitators are central to the sessions – these are volunteers who we have trained to guide conversation and resolve conflict in cross-cultural interactions. They learn how to address areas of imbalance or division in the group; ask thought provoking questions that encourage participants to look at the roots of a perspective; ensure dialogue moves beyond superficial connections and toward deep understanding; and encourage participants to build relationships with each other. Significantly, we train facilitators how to address rather than stifle disagreement, as we believe that learning happens through safe disagreement. 

We target college-aged youth who are traditionally underrepresented in intercultural exchange opportunities such as physical exchange programs. Our geographic focus is North America, Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. We commit to a diverse participant pool to ensure that more students, at a time of division across political, cultural, and social lines, have a chance to develop critical skills that come from engaging with and understanding differences. We thus target students from public and private colleges; community and four-year colleges; colleges located in rural and urban locations; colleges in affluent and less affluent communities; universities with high minority or refugee populations; historically Black Colleges and Universities; and colleges with a high percentage of first-generation students. We also emphasize colleges and organizations in homogenous areas and areas where exposure or access to diversity is limited due to socioeconomic barriers, such as in rural America, desert cities, and refugee camps. We integrate feedback loops in our programming to ensure that we continue understanding and meeting students’ needs.

We work in the field of virtual exchange, which is the practice of using technology to connect people across cultures and continents in live, face-to-face dialogue over a period of time. Our curriculum and use of facilitators ensure that our programming goes beyond cross-cultural exposure to actual skill and attitude development and behavior changes. Working with social scientists, over 17 years we have seen measurable increases in participants in the skills and attitudes that promote better understanding of and between people, namely empathy, critical thinking, inclusive leadership, cross-cultural communication and collaboration, and respect for difference.

Soliya was founded in 2002 by two social entrepreneurs who sought to address the issue of limited youth participation in civic and global affairs: Lucas Welch, a producer with ABC news, and Liza Chambers, a conflict resolution professional. Blending their backgrounds in media and conflict resolution, they designed a program that uses technology to empower youth to understand difference and use that knowledge to prevent and reconcile conflict among their communities.

Joining Soliya in 2004 as a volunteer, I recognized a need for the dialogue sessions in the Connect Program to be facilitated and suggested that the organization develop a program to train graduate students and working professionals as neutral facilitators. The facilitation training program has since become an integral part of Soliya’s mission and has been certified by the UN Habitat and integrated into other initiatives in the field. To date, the training has produced 4,000 facilitators spanning 94 nationalities, creating a worldwide pool of leaders trained in building bridges across difference.

The notion of engaging with people across borders and difference has been my narrative for my whole life. I was born in India and raised in Hong Kong, and as part of my childhood at one point lived on a ship, sailing across the world as my father worked as a marine engineer. I have lived, studied, and worked across six countries, and throughout this multinational journey I cultivated a keen interest in interpersonal dynamics and the seeming inevitability of conflict. Living in both multinational cities and small towns, I saw how distinct narratives of ‘the other’ influenced how people live their lives, impacting whether they approach difference with openness and an intention to understand or with fear and distrust. Extrapolating the exchange of people to the relationships between nations became my key area of interest. I believe through Soliya’s work we stand to change the way the next generation operates: leading with empathy and building just and equitable systems and societies.

For 16 years, in various roles, I have worked to elevate Soliya’s capacity to deliver programs at scale and have been a leading voice in the virtual exchange field, advocating for increased awareness of the power of technology-enabled dialogue, when backed in science, to produce transformative, digital, intercultural learning. I have generated thought leadership through public engagements and publications, such as speaking at Aspen Ideas Festival and being interviewed in Forbes, and forged significant collaborations in the field – for example, leading advocacy efforts that influenced the creation of the first ever public-private partnership in the field, the Stevens Initiative for Virtual Exchange. My Master’s degrees in counseling psychology and international diplomacy lend themselves to Soliya’s methodology, allowing me to lead with the same traits that we wish to instill in our participants: empathy, critical thinking, cross-cultural collaboration, and global awareness. 

In 2015, Soliya was instructed by the Egyptian government to shut down our affiliate office in Cairo – a sudden mandate that was a catastrophic blow to our operating capacity. To mitigate the situation, I secured emergency funding and led a complicated process of relocating our MENA headquarters. A general challenge is fundraising for a small nonprofit organization that works in a relatively new field and that, although has a powerful long-term return on investment by way of societal change, can be hard to sell when donors are seeking more immediate and emotionally gratifying results. In 2012, I worked with two other leaders to establish the Virtual Exchange Coalition as a vehicle for raising awareness and funds for the entire field. I engaged in high-level advocacy work with the Senate Appropriations Committee and the US State Department, resulting, in 2015, in the latter creating the Stevens Initiative for Virtual Exchange –  the first-ever funding mechanism for the field, with Soliya as an inaugural grant recipient. Since then, I approached the European Union and the Canadian government to introduce them to the field, leading to both governments making their first investments in the field.

Leading the Virtual Exchange Coalition and advocacy efforts with the US government, European Union, and Global Affairs Canada.

An innovation on physical exchange and study abroad, virtual exchange uses technology to connect youth across the world to each other for face-to-face, structured online engagement across cultures and countries. A key element of virtual exchange is that the interaction among participants is sustained over a period of time rather than one-off. This sustained contact ensures that participants have time to develop trust and bonds with each other, share perspectives, and build skills. Moreover, unlike other chat platforms and social networking sites that end up being used to reinforce echo-chambers, our proprietary Exchange Portal is specifically designed to encourage active listening, critical thinking, and learning: participants’ video screens are arranged

in a circle, a talking stick method is applied whereby only one participant can speak at a time, and audio is optimized so that all participants, regardless of their technology or internet strength, can be heard clearly. Volunteers, trained through our United Nations-endorsed Facilitation Training Program, are in the group to encourage participants to share and understand perspectives by asking thought-provoking questions and addressing discomfort or power imbalances. Together, these three elements—sustained communication, an inclusive platform, and trained facilitators—strengthen the value of the experience for participants, ensuring that our program makes a difference in their lives.

In intercultural engagement, there is an assumed connection between exposure to the other and the expected result of increased intergroup understanding and peaceful intergroup relations. As such, a common peacebuilding strategy is to connect people across lines of difference in a safe and neutral space, with the expectation that this engagement can build empathy, connection, and trust among people who perceive each other as adversaries. This strategy aligns with a theory of change called intergroup contact theory, also known as contact hypothesis, which proposes that exposure and engagement across lines of difference can improve how groups relate to each other, moving them away from conflict and coercion toward cooperation and compassion. According to a research paper published by the Saxelab at MIT, “meta-analyses of conflict resolution and prejudice reduction programs generally support this theory: intergroup contact is effective in reducing intergroup hostility and negative stereotypes.”[1] In addition, the feeling of self-other overlap that results from this engagement has been shown to “amplify compassion-related responses to others” and make people “more willing to forgo personal rewards to alleviate the suffering of” those from other groups.[2] Our own evidence and learnings gleaned from designing, implementing, and evaluating facilitated dialogue across lines of difference further support the assumptions behind intergroup contact theory. Our programming is also intentionally designed to accommodate dominant and non-dominant groups, bringing underserved youth into opportunities for connection and skill building while encouraging mainstream youth to recognize the importance of inclusion and outreach to the spectrum of members within and across their communities.

[1] “The power of being heard: The benefits of ‘perspective-giving’ in the context of intergroup conflict” (2012) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256752684_The_power_of_being_heard_The_benefits_of_'perspective-giving'_in_the_context_of_intergroup_conflict

[2]  “Compassion, Pride, and Social Intuitions of Self-Other Similarity” (2010) https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/images/uploads/oveis.2010.compassion.pride.pdf

Currently, each year we serve 5,000 college-aged young adults across the world in our virtual exchange programming. In 2021, we aim to reach 6,000, and in five years we aim to reach 15,000. 

Our vision is that in five years, Soliya’s methodology and technology is regarded as best-in-class for the field of virtual exchange, and that the organization triples in participant size, expands geographies, and offers programs in additional languages. In 10 years, we envision Soliya’s model recognized as the most effective in preparing rising generations to engage constructively with diverse perspectives and identities.

Regarding impact measurement, we will continue working with Dr. Emile Bruneau from the University of Pennsylvania to capture the near-term gain of the following skills and attitudes: cross-cultural communication and collaboration, empathy, leadership, critical thinking, understanding of difference, and media literacy.

As part of a grant awarded by the European Union, Soliya currently works with the following organizations to deliver the Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange project: Search for Common Ground, Anna Lindh Foundation, UNIMED, Sharing Perspectives Foundation, Soliya, UNICollaboration, Kiron Open Higher Education, and Migration Matters. Otherwise, we deliver the majority of our work independently. 

Our plan is to maintain our current foundation, government, corporate, and individual donors while securing additional donors in each category. Our goal is to diversify our funding streams, including expanding our existing earned revenue base.

1. Funder: Stevens Initiative (Aspen Institute/ US State Department)
   1. $1,095,000 USD - grant
   2. April 2019 - December 2021
2. Funder: Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange (European Commission)
   1. $870,000 USD - grant
   2. January - December 2020
3. Funder: HSBC
   1. $275,000 USD – grant
   2. July 2019 - June 2020
4. Funder: US Embassy in Kazakhstan
   1. $42,525 USD – grant
   2. October 2019 - June 2020
5. Funder: Transformation Trust
   1. $150,000 USD – grant
   2. September 2019 - August 2020

We consistently seek funding for our organization through foundation, government, and corporate funds; individual donors and crowdfunding; earned revenue; and events. 

We are applying for The Elevate Prize to be part of a community of organizations and individuals seeking to inspire global citizens to shape a more cooperative world.