“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead
Techfugees Australia is back! 🇦🇺
Starting with a meetup on World Refugee Day 20 June 2022.
After several years hiatus, Techfugees Australia is swinging back into action as the war in Ukraine forces huge numbers of people forced to flee their country again. We felt it was time to bring our community together again to welcome the next generation of refugees. It is especially good to go back where it all started in Liverpool hosted by long-term supporter, Mayor Ned Mannoun from Liverpool City Council.
We kicked off in 2015,shortly after Mike Butcher founded Techfugees global. Techfugees Australia was set up by Annie Parker, Nicky Williamson and Anne-Marie Elias and in Sydney includes a group of hard-working friends, Steve King, Jack Skinner, Ryan Cross, Frank Arrigo, Alan Jones, Shelli Trung, Peter Huyhn many of whom come from refugee backgrounds themselves.
At our first Hack in 2015, Nirary Dacho, a Syrian refugee, university lecturer and talented techie shared how hard it was finding work in Australia and his dreams for a better future. That weekend, he met Anna Robson and together they co-founded Refugee Talent, which is still running today.
We held hackathons and meetups from 2015 to 2018 and built a great community of partners like SSI and STARTTS, and sponsors and supporters among big tech businesses including TripAdvisor, Transferwise, Atlassian, Grok Ventures, Microsoft and many more.
Shout out to the new Federal Minister for Industry and Science, Ed Husic who has been a long term supporter and dedicated participant at our events and made a speech about Techfugees and the power of grassroots collaboration in the Australian Parliament.
The meetup on World Refugee Day will include entrepreneurs we met through our events, like Niray Dacho (cofounder of Refugee Talent) and Shaqaeq Rezai our youngest ever participant, Dor Achiek from SSI and Ukrainian Australian Dr Olga Oleinikova, Founder of Persollo, a machine learning and Ai startup and Senior Lecturer on Social and Political Sciences at UTS.
👉 Check out this video about our community filmed by our friends at TripAdvisor and join us on World Refugee Day 20 June 2022 at 5.30pm AEST
Anne-Marie Elias is co-founder (with Annie Parker and Nicky Williamson) of Techfugees Australia and CEO of Beckon Capital