Vision

To serve, empower and educate creating inclusion with the communities with a sense of cooperation, tolerance and awareness, empowering minds, building lives.

DOBA Founders

The vision professed by the founders of DOBA philanthropic project is to impact the lives of refugees and migrants in Europe, creating a network of operational centres in urban areas to support our work, being placed where the need is more urgent.

Almost 70% of refugees and migrants are placed or live in urban areas, due to the need of being near the institutions that can provide administrative or governmental services to comply with all emigration services involved in the process.

Philanthropy’s Mission & Values

To create a positive impact in the life of refugees, helping them overcome the challenges of starting a life in a foreign country, by building bridges of understanding and bringing opportunities together.

DOBA’s mission is to create a positive impact in the life of refugees, helping them overcome the challenges of starting a life in a foreign country, most of times without family support nor a network of friends and not speaking the local language nor being aware of the cultural environment where they’re placed.

We intend to do that through the most powerful tool: education.

We consider that only thru education and empowerment, we can create a long-lasting result, that will remain and will have a broader positive impact, not only in their lives but also in the communities where they’re included.

It is our intent to cooperate not only with local authorities but also to interconnect with corporations and other NGOs, upstream and downstream, since we understand that our reach will be limited by the necessities of someone who is rebuilding life from ground zero, and we can leverage our mission and work creating synergies with other organisations, increasing the reach and the services provided on a coordinated work, instead of having these efforts spread in different organisations and without a coordinated timeline of services. Enlarging not only the number of DOBA’s people and of our partners can impact in a more efficient way.

To support our mission, our work will be based near the communities, where it is most needed, providing counselling and guidance, making assessments regarding individual or a family needs.

In this project, we profess values aligned with the ones practiced in our professional or business activities, because we can’t stand for different values when building philanthropy from those when we are building a business.

Passion for serving. Humanitarian oriented. Intercultural mindset. Education for self-sustainability. Empowerment.

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“The image of Alan Kurdi, lying dead on the sand of a Turkish beach in 2015, was to me like a punch on the stomach. That overwhelming image impacted me for several reasons, mostly because I have a son with his age, and I couldn’t see that image without imagining my son in that same situation, born in the same year, having the same age, gender, and size. Even today, 4 years after, I can’t see nor remember this image without feeling the emotional punch and without emotionally placing myself in that situation.

The Syrian people were having such a normal life as I was having; taking their kids to school, play with them in a garden, meet friends and family for a Sunday lunch, having all the normal things we use to do. But what is normal in a peaceful country, is most implausible in a war scenario.

What if war knocked on our door as it happened with Alan’s family? What if I had to run, fled with just the things I could carry, to protect my family, to save them from certain death, and in the end, I would lose my son on the way to get saved?

That was, probably, the mind-changing situation that made me look and see and feel what was happening. This was no longer a distant and strange reality.

From that day on I always had the desire to engage in something, some process or organisation that could help or ease the pain and difficulties that refugees and migrants face to survive, to save their families and to have a better life. For some of them, a better life is simply something we take for granted and consider “normal” such as having a place to live in, one hot meal per day, clean tap water, or sleep an entire night, in peace, laying their children in a warm and dry bed. “We are so lucky…” I think to myself so many times when I look at my sons sleeping quietly before I turn off the lights.

This desire and wish to contribute was something that I never lost. The years passed by, the desire sometimes desponded but the seed was indeed planted. During the last years providing services and developing relationships with customers and business partners, I came to the point of wanting to do more than just business, than just helping others creating wealth, so I felt an increasing desire of creating an organisation, or working alongside with others, to ease the burden of these people, helping them with this new reality, the new place where they’re settling and re-starting their lives.

From this motivation and support, desire and inspiration started to gain shape, so, using DOBA’s network, I gathered a small group of people with a wide experience in this field and with a vision for the future and thus DOBA philanthropic project was created.

This philanthropic project was born from this will to impact the lives of refugees and other people seeking asylum, needing guidance and help in the process, like translation and dealing with local bureaucracy and emigration services, learning a new language, acquiring a new skill to find a job, intercultural inclusiveness and connections, training and empowerment, while forging them into an entrepreneur mindset.”