Acquaint

A lack of effective communication globally leads to indifference, substantial economic costs, and violent conflict. Failure to communicate with and listen to others worsens inequalities and prevents us from solving global problems.

This problem disproportionately impacts people in regions of the world that are underserved and affected by violent conflict, xenophobia, or a lack of job opportunities.

Multiple indicators suggest a lack of effective communication causes staggering damage to peace and economic opportunities globally: 

• 89% of all current conflicts occur in countries with low intercultural dialogue. 
• Ineffective communication costs US corporations USD 2 trillion in 2023 alone (according to Axios HQ).
• Misinformation, hate speech, and xenophobia, which thrive in environments with limited effective communication, have seen an alarming increase in the past few years.

This quote from the UN further frames the problem and why solving it is essential for global progress:

“Improved communication is the first step towards enhancing interculturalism within diverse societies and laying the foundation for peaceful societies, without which progress towards the SDGs cannot be achieved.” -UNESCO

We've created a platform, Acquaint, where more than 1,100 volunteers from over 108 countries help build peace, raise awareness, and boost effective communication globally. 

Acquaint's model is as follows: 

1. Recruitment: Volunteers worldwide sign up to combat hate, build communication skills, and foster global citizenship.
2. Training and Dialogue: On acquaint.org, volunteers train communication skills through interactive, AI-powered courses and apply them to impactful, live 1-on-1 intercultural dialogue with other volunteers. Intercultural dialogue is a powerful, evidence-based tool to combat hate and bias while building empathy and skills.
3. Local Impact: Volunteers apply their experience on Acquaint to professional opportunities or local challenges to which they have proximity.  Local impacts could include action to bridge divides, overcoming misinformation, or applying their communication skills to any other cause they care about (e.g., climate change).

Essential to the goals of this challenge: the Acquaint platform enables us to offer a powerful, free, and cross-cultural professional development opportunity to areas where it is highly impactful and otherwise unavailable. 

Volunteer Stories

After Acquaint 1-on-1 intercultural dialogue sessions, volunteers have the opportunity to send each other a note of appreciation. These are just a couple of the thousands of appreciation notes shared after a session:

You inspire me to not give up on my way, Sohaib. It was really great to finally understand what Yemen’s war was about and learn from the current situation of it. I love your ideas concerning how music can play a great part in changing our world. And I know for you are a great pianist adding to your communication skills you’ll make it in Yemen. yes, I affirm it: YOU ARE A GREAT LEADER! I enjoyed our conversation. Thank you. -Wesly, Haiti, written for Sohaib, Yemen

Abbey, it was a pleasure talking with you and time flies, an hour felt like 15 minutes. I really enjoyed our conversation about everything and thank you for answering all my questions even though I keep changing the topics. And another thank you for telling me that my English is good, it really boost my confidence. I hope you will dance through your master and another degree with ease and I hope good things will always find you :) -Tiya, Indonesia, for Abbey, USA


Links to learn more:

For a demo of how the sessions look, click here.

For a demo of the AI-powered training, click here.

For volunteer interviews, click here.

While anyone is welcome (and encouraged!) to join as a volunteer, we focus our recruitment strategies on maximizing global representation and impact as we grow. As discussed earlier, improving communication is a universal need for people worldwide, and it is necessary to be globally inclusive to achieve our goal. As such, volunteers come from all walks of life, and we strive to maintain this diversity. 

For Solve's challenge, we want to highlight one of our main focus areas for recruitment that is currently underserved: university students and recent graduates to volunteer from global regions impacted by low employment, violent conflict, and discrimination. However, we want to make clear that this group is not simply a beneficiary but an essential contributor to Acquaint's mission, as are all volunteers on Acquaint.

There are few accessible opportunities like Acquaint for people in this group, especially if they cannot travel internationally. Opportunities for cultural exchange are further exacerbated by prejudice and xenophobia. While cultural exchange and intercultural professional development programs are widely available in Western societies, this is not the case worldwide.

Our solution addresses the needs of this target population from multiple angles: 

• Provides a free, powerful, and accessible way to train the #1 skill employers are looking for: communication, according to LinkedIn. 
• Makes available an intercultural professional development opportunity that primes volunteers for remote work, making them appealing job candidates in our increasingly globalized world. 
• Reduces xenophobia and other biases in targeted areas where prejudice can prevent people from advancing professionally.
• Boosts conflict transformation capacity in locations where volunteers are present, leading to more peaceful communities. 
• Boosts levels of intercultural dialogue, leading to reductions in violent conflict.

Our model also targets recruiting volunteers from global corporations, meaning 1-on-1 dialogue on Acquaint can boost empathy and understanding in a way that directly influences hiring decisions, leading to more inclusion, diverse teams, and global opportunities. 

Team Composition: Despite only six of us on the core team, we have members from four countries, including Canada, Sierra Leone, the United States, and Pakistan. In addition to global reach, our team has connections and experience with universities and corporations where we live. While this is a good start, we intend to continue to grow this diversity in the composition of our team, board, and global community of volunteers.

Constant global feedback and insights: We have a supportive community of volunteers in over 108 nations. On the core team, we constantly get feedback from each other and the volunteer community, informing every step of implementing the Acquaint platform. 

Enabling Local Impact: Acquaint volunteers have the closest proximity to their communities. By offering skills training, global professional development, and tips on how to apply their experience locally, we amplify the impact of those most familiar with the challenges they face.

As a nonprofit, we've built a fully-fledged solution that has enabled over 1,100 volunteers from 108 countries to contribute over 10,000 hours of 1-on-1 intercultural dialogue on the platform and evidence of immense value to our global communities. It is steadily growing. 

One key challenge to making Acquaint achieve a growth phase lies in recruiting volunteers from corporations that have "dollars for doers" programs, as this offers a scalable stream of revenue. We are just beginning our journey of recruiting volunteers directly from corporations and forming corporate partnerships. Becoming a part of the Solver community would be instrumental in working through this, among other challenges. While corporate volunteerism is on the rise, our program's purely reciprocal model is novel and thus does not fit in with many people's vision of corporate volunteerism. Understanding the best ways to appeal to corporations, identifying the right people to contact, and crafting our appeal to corporations are all areas we could use help. We've spent much of our time focused on building an impactful product, but it has left us specialized, with weak spots in other areas. 

Additionally, we always look for global collaborators to help with our partnership initiatives, such as those with universities worldwide. 

Being a part of the Solver community would allow us to share our expertise and insights while helping us thrive by connecting us with the wisdom of others. Becoming a part of the Solver community will fast-track Acquaint and bring this opportunity to many more people.

Disruptive access to intercultural opportunities: We offer a novel use of a web application that allows many more people to help promote communication and combat hate globally. One volunteer living in Nigeria explained: "I've had great conversations with different people living in over 30 nations in just a few months. How else would I do that?" 

Powerful, inclusive communication training & research: Our training uses AI and traditional approaches to create powerful, interactive communication training. Volunteers apply training in 1-on-1 cultural dialogue sessions on the platform. Our web application allows us to measure the impact of different training automatically. This combination enables us to iteratively improve communication techniques with unprecedented speed, efficiency, and inclusion.

Purely reciprocal volunteerism: We're also using volunteerism in a way never seen before. Volunteering is known to be highly beneficial to volunteers. We own this reality in a form of volunteering that is purely reciprocal. This technique is disruptive for boosting global communication as it allows us to recruit and reward many more people to help with this critical cause.

Primary activities:

• Recruitment: Volunteers sign up because they want to combat hate, build communication skills, or increase their professional opportunities.
• Training: Volunteers train intercultural competencies, global citizenship, and communication skills using AI-powered courses on acquaint.org.
• Intercultural Dialogue: Volunteers use these skills in 1-on-1 intercultural dialogue on acquaint.org. This cements their skills, raises global awareness, and provides hands-on experience.
• Local Impact: Acquaint helps volunteers use their skills and knowledge in local communities/organizations through training, encouragement, and recognition. Local impacts could include action to bridge divides, overcoming misinformation, or applying their communication skills to any other cause they care about (e.g., climate change).

Individual Outcomes:

Volunteers' experience on Acquaint helps them build strong relationships, build global empathy (increased motivation to help), and increase job opportunities.

Community Level Outcomes:

Corporations with high numbers of Acquaint volunteers have improved financial performance by enhancing communication, building inclusion, and higher employee retention.

Communities with Acquaint volunteers are more inclusive, have higher employment, and are more able to solve problems collaboratively. 

Worldwide Outcomes:

Increased communication globally enables the world to work together to solve our biggest problems and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. 

We target a combination of direct and indirect impacts:

Direct:

• Reach millions of volunteers each year who report significant improvements in communication skills, global awareness, and increases in empathy. In-app metrics, surveys, and controlled experiments measure this.
• Volunteers report local action in their communities, facilitated by tips and training on Acquaint platform (surveys). Local impacts could include action to bridge divides, overcoming misinformation, or applying their communication skills to any other cause they care about (e.g., climate change). 
• Highly effective and efficient communication/intercultural dialogue training. (Measured by controlled experiments)
• Volunteers are more likely to get and hold remote, international jobs (surveys).

Indirect:

• Corporations with Acquaint volunteers report high levels of employee satisfaction, inclusive culture, and improvements in collaboration, all improving company performance. This will be measured with corporate partners via surveys or their key performance indicators.  
• Communities with Acquaint volunteers report less hate and higher levels of peace. 
• Big picture: if we can improve global communication enough (millions of yearly volunteers may be sufficient), we can break global cycles of hate and violence while significantly reducing inequalities everywhere. 

Our core technology is a globally accessible software platform/web application. We built our web application to make it as convenient and rewarding as possible for participants (volunteers) to connect for 1-on-1 intercultural dialogue sessions. It also offers AI-powered communication skills training (large language models) and immersive icebreaker experiences (WebXR) to promote dialogue (as well as a variety of other technologies). The platform supports low-bandwidth connections, allowing us to include as many people as possible.

Design is critical in achieving effective dialogue. We've built upon decades of intergroup contact and dialogue research while introducing several innovative approaches to maximize impact and learning. Volunteerism and self-determination are central to our model, giving volunteers clear credit for their impact while supporting their agency to find their growth edge. Simultaneously, we also offer structure and tools that further optimize the experience.

2 Full time cofounders and 4 amazing contractors on the core team. 

Almost 3 years. 

As an organization dedicated to combating hate and enhancing global communication, Acquaint must foster a diverse team where every member feels included, valued, and given growth opportunities. Our core team spans four countries—Pakistan, USA, Sierra Leone, and Canada—reflecting our commitment to global diversity. While this is a strong foundation, we plan to expand this diversity further across our core team, board, and advisors.

At Acquaint, we firmly uphold a non-discrimination policy where no team member or applicant will face discrimination based on race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, ancestry, or national or ethnic origin.

We commit to providing equitable opportunities for all potential and current team members. We do our best to foster a culture of open feedback, flexible duties, and space to innovate to support every team member's self-determination. This approach allows for personal growth and helps our team creatively contribute to and drive change within the organization.

We recruit many volunteers who find value in professional development, combating hate, and diverse human connections. They engage in training and 1-on-1 intercultural dialogue on acquaint.org.    

We partner with corporations that want to build inclusion, boost employee retention, and foster a collaborative work culture to recruit volunteers from their employee base. Offering an impactful volunteer program to corporations lays the foundation of our revenue through "dollars for doers" programs, which have surged in popularity in recent years. "Dollars for doers" offers a monetary donation per hour an employee volunteers. This revenue stream is ideal for Acquaint as it scales with our value to corporations and globally. As we grow, our costs per volunteer also decline.

Other revenue streams include corporate sponsorships, small volunteer donations, and research partnerships. 

Our approach to achieving financial sustainability involves multiple revenue streams, primarily focusing on "Dollars for Doers" programs and corporate partnerships:

Corporate "Dollars for Doers" Programs: We engage employees from partner corporations in volunteer activities. For every hour volunteered, corporations make a financial contribution to our platform. This model is scalable and taps into companies' existing corporate social responsibility budgets.

Corporate Partnerships: We partner with companies seeking enhanced employee engagement and training. This dramatically improves the recruitment of corporate employees. Our platform offers valuable communication and intercultural experiences that boost corporate training, culture, and collaboration.

Donations from Volunteers: While our services to volunteers are free, we encourage donations from those who find value in our offerings. This can supplement Acquaint's income, relying on the volunteer's desire to help the mission and appreciation for the program.

Evidence of Success: Although we are in the early stages and have not yet generated significant revenue via "Dollars for Doers" programs, the potential for success is high. Research shows that companies invested in volunteering have lower employee turnover and higher engagement. Improving culture and employee engagement in volunteer programs have been shown to greatly impact employee retention. According to Axios HQ, inefficient communication could cost $15,000 per corporate employee. Acquaint's program will help improve this number, further incentivizing corporations to help us recruit their employees as volunteers.