Inspiring Women: A Conversation with Sol, Founder of Give Your Best
To celebrate Give Your Best turning one last month, we spoke to Give Your Best’s founder, the amazing Sol! While Sol, like many of the women in our community, has lived in and travelled through many countries, she has always been outraged by the fact that her journey to the UK is seen as an ‘adventure’, whereas people who have had to flee for their lives are often viewed (or portrayed by some media outlets) as criminal. With a strong passion for supporting and raising awareness of refugees’ experiences, combined with frustration about in-person relief coming to a stand-still last year, Sol developed the idea of Give Your Best. Read more to learn more about her story, how GYB all started, and Sol’s reflections on the past year!
A love of different countries, cultures, and languages…
While she was born and raised in Uruguay, Sol has now lived for over half of her life outside her home country. This was something she never expected when she originally moved from Uruguay to Canada, after receiving a scholarship to study neuropsychology. After three and a half years in Canada, Sol decided to explore and travel around Europe. Sol wanted to make the most of her Italian citizenship from her Dad’s side of the family, so the first country she travelled to in Europe was Italy.
Having not been able to travel much in Latin America, where there were limited affordable travel options at the time, Sol loved travelling around Europe, mostly because it allowed her to learn more about different countries, cultures and languages. She took a break from studying during this time and lived in Italy for a year. This was followed by time spent in Spain and Germany, where she loved being able to meet and talk to new people and learn the language of the country she was living in.
“It wasn’t constant travel, I loved to choose a country and go there, find a job, find a place to live and stay for like 6 months to 10 months and then I’d be like: “Okay, now I’m going to go to the next country and see how that goes!”…I liked to settle somewhere and explore the culture and meet people.”
After 3 years of travelling and exploring different countries, Sol decided she wanted to settle somewhere more permanently. As English was the language she spoke the best at the time, she moved to the UK to continue studying, although this time in a different subject area.
“Brains and human behaviour fascinated me but…I had fallen in love with cultures and languages and people, so I decided to change my studies completely and I went to university to study languages and linguistics and cultures and that’s the career I went into: I went to teach languages and cultures at university for over 10 years.”
…and a strong desire and motivation to help others.
Sol has always been interested in experiences of migration, integration and supporting refugees, particularly as she is very aware of the different experiences and perceptions people have of these issues.
“One of the things that never sits well with me is that dichotomy of ‘the immigrant’ and immigrant journeys, because my journey of going through so many different countries over the last decade to come and settle in the UK, everyone thinks that you’re so adventurous, you’re so fun for doing all these things. Whereas someone who maybe did the exact same journey, but because they were fleeing for their lives, that journey is seen as criminal.”
When Sol first moved to Cambridge (where she now lives working at the university in educational development), she began volunteering with an organisation that provides relief work in Calais. This experience strongly affected her, and led her to continue volunteering in Calais every few weeks for two and a half years–right up until the first lockdown.
“The first time I went to Calais, and I actually saw what was happening and you actually meet the people that headlines are talking about…making that human connection... I just couldn’t stop thinking about them…Coming back and being so concerned, and almost consumed with worry for the people that I had met there. And then I’d be super angry that no one was doing anything–like, why are you leaving those people there?! And I’d go to work and people would ask me how it went, and I didn’t know how to articulate it.”
Realising that few people knew about the severity of the situation in Calais, Sol hosted lunchtime sessions at her work to raise awareness, and to encourage people to volunteer with the organisation as well. She also organised the first ever Refugee Week event at her work where she invited people from refugee and activist backgrounds to speak. The event was attended by around 80 people, several of whom told her they had never met someone who was a refugee before and had never heard their stories first-hand. This is something that Sol thinks is incredibly important: enabling people with lived experiences to tell their own stories, which can have a significant impact on others.
Frustration as a motivator for good
Last year was incredibly difficult for everyone, and Sol reflects that it was especially hard for organisations relying on voluntary support. It was during this period of frustration about not being able to do more to help people, that the idea for Give Your Best came about.
“It was a very frustrating time for charities in general, and for people that were so used to supporting others in person…That’s kind of what Give Your Best was born out of - I was thinking how could I support people who, because of the pandemic, are even more isolated than before and even more marginalised. Give Your Best was born out of frustration of wanting to do something.”
Give Your Best (GYB) is at the intersection of overlapping, important issues, such as sustainability, refugee rights and the empowerment of women. Sol thinks that GYB gained supporters particularly quickly, in part due to this intersection of issues it tackles, and people’s desire to do something to help others during a pandemic. This is something Sol hopes continues, particularly as there are more and more instances of people becoming displaced.
“I think it was a good time for that community activity and community feeling, because it was when all of the mutual aid groups were cropping up and where communities really realised that we have to support each other through this or we’re not going to make it. A lot of people responded really well to what we were creating because they felt if they could, they should really be supporting people in less fortunate positions. […] I’m really hoping that the past year has highlighted the need…to continue to come together and support people – which can already be seen in the supportbeing provided for people arriving from Afghanistan. It does give me hope.”
Reflecting on a year of Giving Your Best
Looking back on what GYB has achieved over the past year, Sol says she is still struck by how much has happened and been achieved, where GYB now supports over 550 women, and is run by over 100 volunteers.
“I can’t believe it’s been a year! In a way it feels like I’ve been doing this my whole life, and on the other hand I can’t believe we’ve actually made it this far. Because the first three months we didn’t know what we were doing, it was just an idea that I had one day: let’s open an Instagram page and see what happens...Now in total–including our Give Your Besties–we have about 160 people involved!...It always catches me off guard, sometimes I just stop myself and go ‘Oh! We’ve done quite a lot!’”
While she never thought she would be in a position where she essentially works two full-time jobs, Sol feels that setting up and building the initiative made 2020 more bearable, and she feels thankful for the GYB community.
“GYB is an immense amount of work…but at the same time it really did get me through lockdown…It helped me, mentally, to have this community that we’ve all built…It really does restore your faith in humanity a little bit every day…Maybe it was a little bit selfish on my part too, because I wanted to [virtually] hang out with a really great group of people during lockdown! […] And I think the little community we have – with the volunteers and the Shoppers, and the supporters – is such a lovely community to be part of. I don’t take credit at all, it’s everyone’s achievement, and we would not be able to do what we do without every single person that volunteers with us.”
When asked what she is most proud of, Sol says it’s taking the first step in starting GYB, which sometimes can be the hardest thing.
“The thing with Give Your Best, it was that there was such an urgency for it that for once I thought ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect, we’re going to try it anyway. Even with the name: the first time I met GYB two first ever volunteers, Hannah and Georgia, and we were just brainstorming names, we were like: ‘Let’s just call it Give Your Best for now, if it doesn’t work, we’ll change it – it doesn’t matter, no one’s going to follow us!’ We were just like ‘Let’s just put it out there and see what happens’. I think taking that first step can be very hard sometimes, for me at least, so I think that’s an achievement. Once it was out in the world, GYB took on a life of its own and we couldn’t stop. Thousands of items of clothing, hundreds of women shopping, so many volunteers… I couldn’t stop GYB even if I wanted to, and I really don’t want to stop!.”
What’s the Best that can happen?!
Sol believes strongly that GYB will continue to grow much more in years to come to fully become a solution to clothing waste and clothing poverty, while supporting people affected by displacement–aspirations also shared by GYB’s volunteers.
“In a world where we have literally millions and millions of items of clothing that end up in landfills, but we also have millions of people that can’t afford clothing – why? Donating things for people to shop for free: why can’t that be the norm, rather than throwing things away or reselling things that certain communities still can’t afford? In the same way that there’s a lot more awareness of food waste and it feels like that’s being tackled a lot more – there are apps and networks for that – why can’t we do that for clothing? A lot of the time, clothing is considered a luxury, but it really isn’t.”
Everyone at GYB is excited about its plans for the future, including the new web Shop which will be going live early next year. This new online platform aims to expand GYB’s services to more people and enable more people to both donate and Shop more easily.
And for those with a vision or idea, Sol has the following advice to give others reading this:
“If you have an idea which you think might be a solution to a social problem, try it out! What’s the worst that can happen? Maybe you waste some of your time but maybe you meet great people in the process, and if it doesn’t work it doesn’t work. But if it does, what’s the best that can happen? Here we are: I would never in a million years have thought this was the best that could happen! […] I’m sure we’ll do plenty of things in the future that aren’t going to work but that’s definitely not going to be a reason to not keep doing it. We have big plans for Give Your Best in the future…We’ll take over the world one day!”
