The Road Less Traveled

Our guest for this episode is Vladimira Briestenska, the co-founder of Neem, a financial wellness business out of Pakistan, enabling underserved communities across emerging markets. With a global perspective and a strong commitment to social impact, she conceives entrepreneurship as a force for good, committed to create positive impact in the society.​
She went on this journey when realised that once people are actually empowered financially, it can have a massive impact on other areas of their lives. For instance, when women become financially independent, they become ability to take care of their education, or the education of their children, or able to start their own businesses or leave abusive relationships because they are financially independent.​
What lead her to the tech sector was intuition and curiosity. The relationship to risk of entrepreneurs to risk of entrepreneurs was refreshing. She saw entrepreneurs, and the people in the tech sector, driving and creating change. It was very exciting and liberating, compared to what she had seen before in the policy world, or in the world of NGOs, where she felt there was so much of dependency on grant funding.
​She hopes that she can impact a few individuals in her life on their own journeys as change agents and help them to break, maybe the stereotypes or the boxes that have been created for them by the environment, by their upbringing, or by themselves, and that are limiting them to show up in their lives fully alive and do things that they feel are unrealistic.
Therlt | Episode 26

The guest of this episode, Federico Batista Poitier, studied first forensic anthropology and then human rights. After graduating from the European Master in Human Rights and Democratisation, he specialised in issues related to accessibility and the implementation of the UN Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Federico started working on issues related to disability when he was an English teacher in South Korea and worked in an inclusive school.
He currently works as accessibility policy officer for United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), that he describes as a kind of UN of local and regional governments. 65 % of the Sustainable Development Goals need implementation at the local level to be realised by 2030. He particularly focuses on accessibility as mandated through the international human rights framework of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability and its article 9, a lot of the competency to implement this article being with local governments. This implementation is sometimes made difficult with coordination and centralisation.

The guest of our fifth episode is Vanessa Trapani is a graduate of the European Master in Human Rights and Democratisation. She currently works as an independent consultant for the social innovation of SMEs and co-founded an NGO called Sloworking, which is committed to spread a work-life balance culture and support women in their professional and economic empowerment.
Her passion for diversity brought her to the European master in human rights and then led her to an eclectic path. She thinks of diversity as an external concept but as well as a concept that applies to ourselves. We are multidimensional beings and we have to find the balance between all the identities within ourselves. We have to defend that right to be who we are and who we are becoming in order to be coherent with ourselves.
What helped her to be coherent with herself was slowness. Slowness is not about working less but about working better. It is about quality, about relationships, about finding the right time - ‘il tempo giusto’ in Italian-, about making sense of what you do.

The second podcast of the series ‘The Road Less Traveled’ features Iryna Matviyishyn who is currently working as an independent journalist and producer based in Liev, Ukraine.
After a degree in journalism, Iryna felt the need to specialise. She realised that she had always been interested in human rights but did not have the word for it. “I just did not know that this concept and this education existed. I never thought about it in terms of a degree. When I was researching for a master’s degree, I was mostly looking for a degree in international relations, but then, out of the sudden I saw a degree in human rights. I immediately understood that this is what I wanted to do.”
She considers that the knowledge acquired studying human rights helps her to make her news coverage deeper and also more focused. When the full-scale war started, she felt the urgency to write in English to inform people outside Ukraine about the horrors and the terror they were witnessing.
Her advice to journalists who want to specialise in human rights is to keep an open mind but more importantly to be human and compassionate as this is how people trust you more. She insisted as well on the need to comply with the ethics of journalism, to network and keep practising.
This episode closes with a call from Iryna to all of us to keep speaking about Ukraine and not to succumb to war fatigue. Inform yourself and share information about what is happening in Ukraine.

The guest of this episode is a Bulgarian-Armenian director, choreographer, producer, and writer exploring empathy through movement and storytelling. His dancing career started with ballroom dancing when he was 5. After a childhood full of dance competitions during weekends, Kosta started working as a professional dancer at 18 with Dancing with the stars Vietnam.
While he was studying dance in New-York, he made a 6-minute dance short film, Waiting for Color, about the violations of human rights of LGBT people in Chechnya. “It was really a very personal work. I think every artist is lucky if they have two or three of these works in their life, when you feel so moved to create something that it doesn't matter if it is with a budget or without, but you feel like you are really drawing the inspiration out of thin air and you feel so sure that this is the project that you were made to create.”
“There is something about art, in general, when it is done in a truthful way, that just makes you stop in your tracks.” Organisations working with human rights can learn a lot from dance as dance is about growing together. Dance is a conversation where you invite the other person, you take risks together and then you finally “become fabulous” and go further together than you would have gone alone. “Sometimes you need to find that flexibility and freedom to feel that we are moving forward.”