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Sol Escobar: The Thoughtful Leader
Interview & Words Hannah George
Sol Escobar, founder of Non-profit Organization, Give Your Best, began to support refugees and women seeking asylum through the platform she established for them to shop online for free. WOTC’s Hannah George speaks with Sol on where it all started and the impact she has made.
How did you come up with the name?
It wasn't me who came up with it. I kind of had the idea of what ‘Give Your Best’ would be and I ran a little pilot in September last year and when I thought that ‘Give Your Best’ could actually become something that we could offer to more women than basically just the one household that I tried it out with, I put it out on social media to see if anyone would want to help me set it up, because I knew I wasn't going to be able to do it by myself. I had two women reach out to me that I didn't actually know, and they were like, “oh, we love the idea we love to help you with it.” We just met up on a Friday night and had a few glasses of wine and we were brainstorming about what we should call it.
One of them was around the idea of giving your best and then one of them suggested ‘Give Your Best’ because that means that you're giving your best clothes, but also you're giving the best of yourself and that's how we came up with the name. But I won't take credit for that, it was a group effort.
What inspired you to start helping women, refugees and asylum seekers?
I've been involved in volunteering for charities both that support the refugee community and also people seeking asylum, both in the UK and abroad for a few years. I went abroad to Calais and locally as well in Cambridge, where there are quite a few families who have resettled here from Syria, with the government's scheme. I've been volunteering with them for a few years. When the pandemic hit we were not able to go to Calais anymore and we weren't even able to meet the families that we were supporting here. I was teaching English one to one and going to their house and supporting the parents and the children, but we were not able to do that anymore.
It felt very frustrating for me to know that there were so many people that needed support but who were very difficult to reach because technology is limited. It was through one of these charities that I was supporting this one household of women who are still seeking asylum in Wales and they were telling me how difficult they were finding accessing services, especially getting clothes and menstrual products, because they only get five pounds a day. This was in August last year and all of the charity shops were closed. I just remember thinking how isolated they were. I wanted to send them some of my clothes, because I had a few clothes that I wanted to donate anyway, but because there were about ten women and they were all of different sizes, I thought, ok, I'll just put it out on social media to see if any of my friends had any clothes to donate to them . I received so many offers that I thought on the one hand, I don't want to tell people I can't take your clothes or, you know, that it's too much. On the other hand, I didn't want to send a whole bunch of random things to this group of women and so I thought I would talk to them and I ask them if I put photos of the items that we have on Instagram, is it ok for them to choose what they want and then send them the items they choose. That's how it started. At the beginning, they were very much like, “oh, please don't bother doing that, it's too much work for you and we are in no position to say no to anything that you send to us.”
I remember thinking, it's already very difficult to assert our choices and our opinions as women and you'll be carrying for a long time this feeling of “I'm not worth choosing what I want, I just deserve whatever people give me” . And for women in their situation, having been through a system that is designed to strip you of all of your dignity is even worse to regain the sense of self worth. I thought if just choosing one item of clothing at a time, we can start restoring that sense of autonomy. I thought if it works for this one household, then maybe it works for more people? So I tried it, that's basically how Give Your Best started.
Talk to me about the team you work with.
At the moment there are forty-eight of us, but we're in the process of recruiting another five women, not because we're not open to anybody else, but because it's happened that way, we have so much interest from women that want to donate their time, which is just amazing that they want to contribute to what we're doing.
We have different teams behind the scenes that do different things. We have our team that deals with all the operational side of things and all of the donations that are submitted through a website, uploading things to our shop, processing orders, mediating between the donors and the shoppers. We have a whole team for social media and marketing that is in charge of putting the word out there about what we do, because obviously if people don't know that they can donate clothes through us, then we don't have anything for our free shop.
We also have five women from the community that we support. We want to be able to offer more volunteering opportunities to women who are either still seeking asylum and hence they are banned from working, but they can still volunteer, and also women who already have the refugee status, but they need some experience before they start working. For us it is very important to have people from the community that we are supporting, involved in what we're doing because we're doing this for them, so we need to have them involved to make sure that what we're doing is actually useful.
When the lookdown is over, how are you planning to support the women in France?
At the moment Give Your Best focuses on women in the UK and there are other organisations in Calais. There's the Refugee Women's Centre and a couple of other organisations that support locally. We are in touch with them and if they need any sort of my baby's clothes or women's clothes, we do send some to them as well. At the moment we're focussing on the women in the UK because we really did realise that the journey doesn't end when they reach the UK, that there's a minimum average wait of between one and two years in the community for women to receive their refugee status and throughout that time, they are not allowed to work. They receive very, very small amounts of financial support. Many of them are very isolated, especially throughout this year. At the moment, we're focussing our efforts in the U.K and have nearly 400 women registered with us.
What's your vision? What would you like to do in the next few years and would you like to expand internationally?
Lately I've been receiving quite a few messages from people asking if we are even thinking of putting something up in different countries or if we know of anything similar in other countries. We've done some research and we actually haven't found anything like what we're doing. We would definitely like to expand to other countries as well, but we really need to have our processes and our system robustly developed first, because at the moment we're still new.
We're still figuring out how to do this properly. Everything that we do at the moment is manual and very time consuming, mainly because we don't have the tech to support it, because we don't have the funding yet to develop it. We have a small team of tech web developers that are working on developing our own kind of shop and marketplace, but the problem is that it needs to be very secure because of the vulnerable population that it will be for. We have discovered that we can’t use any kind of readymade software that exists out there and so we really need to have our own tech solution that works properly before we are able to expand anywhere else. However, we definitely would love to, we have big plans and big dreams for what we want to do under the umbrella of Give Your Best with the charitable activity of the clothes exchange at its core. We also want to be able to offer other services and other types of support for the women in our community. We are in the process of developing a mentorship programme, with a support community that they can join, which is something that we're already trialling. We’re only a group of volunteers, and things take a little bit longer to develop, but we're getting there and we're doing all sorts of great things at the moment!
What impact does fashionable clothing have on the mental health of these women?
There are women that have been shopping with us for a few months, that we have got to talk to and to know a little bit better and you can really see how a lot of the women, when they come to shop with us for the first time, they only choose one item, even though they can choose more than that. There is a sense of, "I only choose what I need, a jumper to stay warm or a coat that I need for winter." Over the months, you can really see how they start to shop items because they like them rather than because they need them.
On the other hand, for the women who are donating their clothes, it's about knowing that on the other side of the package they’re sending, there's a woman who is their same size and has their same fashion sense, but is living in such a different reality and circumstance. It really humanises the refugee crisis that you see in the headlines. It brings back the human side of it and the connexion. We encourage the women sending the packages to include a little note of support or a little extra chocolate or something to make it really special. It's meaningful for the women we support to receive such lovely packages and notes and to feel like they're not alone and they have a community, even when people don't know them are actually so welcoming. Through the medium of clothing that is a lovely connexion that has been created.