Conversations Unbound

Tutors who are interested in teaching their native language should contact Conversations Unbound using the email below.

Any student can sign up to work with Conversations Unbound tutors. Students are paired with experienced online tutors who are fantastic conversationalists. It's a pay-as-you-go system, so students learn at their own pace. ($15/hour, and 100% goes directly to the tutor).

Conversations Unbound also works with universities, high schools, and educational institutions to integrate Conversations Unbound sessions as a key component of their Arabic, Spanish, French, or German course curricula. Check out how professors have used Conversations Unbound in this EuropeNow article.

Title	Conversations Unbound
Date launched	01/01/2015
Status (Ongoing, forthcoming)	Ongoing
Type of Resource	Platform
Purpose	Social Inclusion Employment
Online or Blended	Online
Learning outcomes	Conversations Unbound aims to create opportunities for displaced people to increase their agency and economic opportunities. The organization works with people who are new to tutoring and provides them with the platform, training, and students to develop their skills as online language tutors. By creating initial opportunities for income generation, Conversations Unbound enables its tutors to cultivate long-term skills and transfer them to other career endeavors. With the onset of COVID-19, this program provides a safe, socially distant income opportunity at a time when it is often the most vulnerable populations who face reduced opportunities to work due to the pandemic. Conversations Unbound also provides a robust educational experience for students to improve their foreign language skills, engage in rich, cross-cultural dialogue, and think critically about forced displacement. Not only do students have the opportunity to strengthen their foreign-language conversational skills, but they are also provided with the chance to meet people who have different lived experiences. These one-on-one conversations allow Conversations Unbound students and tutors to find commonalities while learning to appreciate and respect their differences. In a world where hateful rhetoric about "others" is increasingly prevalent, Conversations Unbound works to break down the deeply entrenched "us versus them" mentality perpetuated through xenophobic narratives surrounding immigration and displacement.
Target group	Forcibly displaced people
Evaluation results/ monitoring plan	Since the organization’s inception, 981 students have benefitted from Conversations Unbound tutoring and completed over 3,500 hours of sessions.
Learning assessment	N/A
Recognition or certification of learning	N/A
Europass	Aligned with all basic Europass fields
Financing and sustainability model	The tutoring sessions are paid for by the students or university partners and 100% of the earnings go directly to the tutors. Conversations Unbound takes no commission. The Conversations Unbound administrative team is composed of volunteers who dedicate between 5-25 hours each per week. There are no paid staff. Any overhead expenses are supported via grants and/or grassroots fundraising. Past grants have included the OZY Genius Award and a grant from Vassar College (Ellen Rudnick Fund).
Leading Organization	Conversations Unbound, US
Contact Person	This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Website	https://www.conversationsunbound.org
Is this initiative country-specific? If yes, please specify the country	No

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Conversations Unbound

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