When the influx of refugees rocked Europe in 2015, enormous pressures were placed on existing structures and institutions. There was not only a possibility but an urgent need to develop new ways of responding to the challenge of integrating refugees. This was the moment when Anne Kjær Riechert created the Redi School of Digital Integration. Ben Mason talked to her about where the idea came from.
In moments of global challenges, old narratives often are no longer proving to be effective. New approaches complement the adaption of worn-out structures. But how can we innovate or reform our frameworks quickly enough to keep pace and to prevent organizations, or even whole sectors, from being swept away? However, sometimes the best innovations stem from conditions of change and uncertainty: Right in the middle of one of the most significant crises in Europe, Anne co-founded the Redi School of Digital Integration in response to the refugee crisis in 2015.
Anne Kjær Riechert created the Redi School - (all photos (c) by Mark Beckmann, Agentur Ostkreuz)
At the Redi School of Digital Integration, a non-profit organization, asylum seekers and refugees are being offered a vocational training program that teaches them coding, programming, and tech skills. When I meet her at ReDI’s main campus in central Berlin, it is semester break, and the rooms are quiet. But a few weeks earlier I had experienced the same space full of life, and young people from Afghanistan and Syria were standing in front of a group pitching their idea for a new app.
The idea of Redi is an elegant answer to multiple challenges facing German society. On the one hand, the country’s economy – with its long-standing focus on manufacturing and an aging workforce – is under great pressure to adapt to the digital age. According to one estimate, there are over 50,000 unfilled IT jobs nationwide. On the other hand, the refugee movement of 2015–16 saw over a million people, mostly from Syria, many of them young and educated, arrive in Germany. This presented various challenges of how to integrate and include the newcomers. What if some of these new arrivals could be trained as computer programmers? At a stroke, they could transform from a burden to an asset in Germany’s economic transition – and at the same time, not just individuals but refugee families and communities could get a stable financial footing.
Redi School in Berlin. Photos by Marc Beckmann When I ask her where the idea for Redi came from, Anne does not start by talking about that turbulent summer in 2015, but goes back three years further. In 2012, she founded the Berlin Peace Innovation Lab in collaboration with Stanford PIL. The lab focuses on how technology is facilitating emerging and measurable social change towards global peace.
The Berlin-based group is united by a desire to make an impact, and a conviction that innovative approaches and in particular tech-based approaches (hence the Stanford–Silicon Valley connection) could help do this more effectively. At regular meet-ups, practitioners and enthusiasts for social change would share experiences, ideas, and inspiration. At the first meet-up, 30 people came; three years later in 2015, the Lab had become a sprawling and diverse community of around 1,700 people.
"Truly sustainable ideas are born out of communities, a group of people with a shared set of values."Anne Kjaer Riechert
This community became the soil out of which Redi could grow. “Truly sustainable ideas,” says Anne, “are not created by a single founder, but are born out of communities, a group of people with a shared set of values. And by bringing them together in a structured way, you get not one project, but several.” Before founding the ReDi School and setting up the Stanford Peace Innovation Lab, Anne Kjær Riechert graduated in 2006 from the Danish business and design school Kaospilot in Denmark. As a corporate social responsibility consultant, she developed and implemented Samsung Electronics’ corporate social responsibility strategy for Scandinavia.In July 2010, Anne moved to Japan, where she spent two years researching open social innovation and received the prestigious Rotary Peace Fellowship. In 2016, Anne was recognized by the German Capital magazine as “Young Elite – Top 40 under 40.” However, the ideal of leadership Anne describes seems to have less to do with decisively setting a direction and more to do with creating an enabling environment for others: “My strength is in bringing them together and guiding them through that creative process.”https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=wz0mlDELSo0
Fast forward to 2015, as the rate of refugee arrivals was reaching levels unprecedented in Europe since the end of World War II. Tens of thousands of Germans were moved by the images filling their TV screens and wanted to help – but did not know how. The governmental structures and established NGOs trying to respond were pushed to breaking point. The need was acute, the willingness to help was there, but the structures to bridge that gap were missing. And this is where the decentralized network of the Berlin Peace Innovation Lab kicked into action.
Several members of the community had direct connections to the response effort. Anne joined one of the trips they were making to a reception camp. Out of a conversation with an Iraqi man who had been a software developer back home, an idea was born. True to her philosophy of open collaboration, Anne did not take this idea away and develop it; instead she posted on Facebook: “If we made a coding school for refugees, would you help?"
The next morning, over 30 people had replied – professional coders offering to teach classes, people pledging laptops and donations. Redi was born.