Social Impact Heroes Helping Our Planet: Why & How Tina Ramirez Of Hardwired Global Is Helping To Change Our World
An Interview With Martita Mestey
Our local and national officials can prioritize religious freedom as foreign and domestic policy. They and their constituents can become a voice for those who don’t have one and bring attention to religious freedom abuses abroad and here at home.
As part of my series about “Individuals and organizations making an important social impact”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Tina Ramirez.
Tina Ramirez is the Founder and President of Hardwired Global and brings to the organization more than 20 years of experience as an educator, policy advisor and expert on international human rights and religious freedom. Tina’s educational programs, which have been published in several journals, have provided significant evidence of successful methods to help children overcome violence and intolerance and protect the freedom of religion, conscience or belief, not just for themselves but for everyone. Tina has published extensively on international human rights and religious freedom and is the author of Iraq: Hope in the Midst of Darkness (2017) and a contributing author and editor of Human Rights in the United States: A Dictionary and Documents (2010 and 2017).
Tina holds a certificate from the International Institute for Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, a MA in Education from Vanguard University, and a MA in International Human Rights from the University of Essex, UK.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit. Can you tell us a bit about how you grew up?
I grew up in an average American home. My parents were doctors who served lower-income rural communities and taught me the value of service to people who needed it most. I lived with my grandfather during college and he reinforced these same values of family, faith, hard work and service to others. Throughout college I had the opportunity to study human rights and learn about how people of all different religions were being persecuted throughout the world and by the time I was 19, I had decided to pursue a future defending religious freedom for people who didn’t have it. For the last 25 years, my life has been spent serving others and defending their freedom and dignity through teaching and the work I’ve done around the world.
You are currently leading a social impact organization that is making a difference for our planet. Can you tell us a bit about what you and your organization are trying to change in our world today?
In today’s world, many people are still attacked because of their religious and ethnic identity. In fact, a vast majority of people in the world — more than 80% — do not have the freedom to worship, express their beliefs, or live according to their conscience. The lack of respect for pluralism has resulted in significant global conflicts and hindered economic and political stability worldwide. Even in recent history, we have seen genocides carried out against religious and ethnic minority groups, such as the genocide of Yezidis by ISIS in northern Iraq in 2014 and the Muslim Rohingyas by the Burmese military in 2017.
I’ve always had a keen interest in human rights, especially during my college years. After 10 years in the heart of human rights, I launched Hardwired Global, a non-governmental organization to fight the root causes of religious oppression around the world. Our work is helping change generational cycles of violence and intolerance and build more peaceful, pluralistic societies. Through the training of educators and local community leaders, Hardwired Global has transformed the hearts and minds of youth towards greater respect for the dignity and freedom of all people, regardless of background or belief. By investing in a culture of freedom for people of diverse backgrounds and beliefs, we can alleviate the factors that cause recurrent religion-related conflict and reduce the need for costly military and humanitarian interventions worldwide.
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?
For me, this work is deeply personal. As a child, my father converted to another religion than what our family practiced. For ten years, we had deep, often divisive conversations about our faiths, which was not easy.
But through this experience, I learned to dialogue with people who believe differently without having to compromise my own beliefs. I learned how valuable our freedom of conscience is.
We’ve all had people we don’t agree with, but we are able to have these kinds of conversations because we have a culture here that protects this freedom. However, around the world, this freedom is a foreign concept; one that must be fought for still. My passion is helping people live with greater dignity and freedom –it’s how we are hardwired.
Many of us have ideas, dreams, and passions, but never manifest them. They don’t get up and just do it. But you did. Was there an “Aha Moment” that made you decide that you were actually going to step up and do it? What was that final trigger?
In 2007, I went to work for the U.S. Congress as a foreign policy advisor and built the International Religious Freedom Caucus, which worked to liberate and defend victims of religious persecution worldwide. Through this work, I observed that the oppressed minorities who were disproportionately affected by conflict were largely ignored by policymakers who were more focused on military objectives. Unfortunately, the interventions of our government were often reactionary or too late.
I saw a need to help these people on the ground and to prevent intolerance and persecution from happening in the first place, but in an innovative way that would create lasting change — unlike the band-aids of military or humanitarian aid.
As a former teacher, I have seen firsthand the impact teachers can have on students toward greater respect for others. During my first master’s degree, I did a study on the impact of human rights in the classroom and worked with my students on projects about a variety of human rights issues around the world. One young man, a refugee from Afghanistan pre-9–11 who also happened to be a bully, did his project looking at the situation of women in Afghanistan under the Taliban. He was so inspired by what he learned and his newfound knowledge of the universal human rights that they deserved, that he wrote a letter to then-President Bush urging him to help these women who were “like a bird in a cage without a voice.” His attitude toward others changed and he wasn’t a bully anymore. His letter inspires me to this day to know how important it is to work with children early on and help them see the dignity and value in others.
Many people don’t know the steps to take to start a new organization. What are some of the things or steps you took to get your project started?
As the founder, I brought to the organization ten years of prior expertise engaging foreign governments and civil society on laws and policies to advance human rights by developing a curriculum that taught children to value the freedom of others. We had the ability to set up in countries where I had previously worked and with local partners as well as achieve measurable success in a short period of time.
Given the situation in certain countries and with support from financial partners, we modeled our program in Sudan and Iraq within our first two years and they provided a clear “return on investment” and “proof of impact” for our supporters which allowed us to expand our reach globally.
Our programs have been successful because of the methods of conceptual change employed in our trainings, where we lead people to understand their own perspectives of freedom of religion or belief and their view of others, and then work through those base perspectives to develop new perspectives that build greater understanding and respect for the rights of others in their community. Changing perspectives and building an understanding of others’ perspectives and the rights and freedoms we all share is critical to the success of our program and the impact we’ve achieved in a short period of time.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company or organization?
There are several stories that have shown the impact of the work we’re doing and inspired us to continue expanding.
1. Following our training in Iraq, the Ministry of Religious Affairs director was so inspired by our work that he helped pass a law to officially recognize seven religious groups in the country. He then took the representatives from each community to Halabja and had them each plant a tree to symbolize the seeds of peace they wanted to plant in their country for the religious freedom of everyone. He called it “Tina’s Garden.” The idea was inspired by a lesson two Yezidi teachers in our program had written called “The Peaceful Garden.” The lesson took students to a garden to collect bouquets of flowers from all the colorful flowers except flowers of one color. Then the students were asked to look at the garden that they had ravaged. The teachers explained that the garden symbolized their country — when ISIS came in, they destroyed everyone except for the people that looked and believed like them. When the students heard about this, they were able to reflect on the lesson of the garden. The teachers gave them seeds to replant the garden and learn what it would take to rebuild their country — the seeds of peace and freedom.
2. A judge who went through our training program shared a story. He was from a Muslim family that fled Mosul when ISIS came in and began our training. He shared the ideas with others and defended minorities affected by ISIS. When he attended another training, he shared an image of ISIS beheading his brother and said that he would continue to fight for justice and share the ideas of religious freedom we taught him because if he didn’t, then this is the reality that would affect everyone in Iraq.
It has been said, that sometimes our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Do you have a story about a humorous mistake that you made when you were first starting and the lesson you learned from that?
The greatest challenge for any new organization is mission creep. It has been difficult to stay focused on our mission of education and training when there are so many humanitarian needs and people fleeing persecution around the world. We’ve worked with a couple of cases and ensured that those we’ve worked with were able to get somewhere safe if they were forced to flee torture in their home countries because of our work, always with the understanding that local resettlement is the best option. We’ve learned from these experiences how much more important it is to stay focused on working inside the country to make it safe for people to stay, not on advocacy that leads people to leave.
None of us can be successful without some help along the way. Did you have mentors or cheerleaders who helped you to succeed? Can you tell us a story about their influence?
Several of our contractors have been instrumental in our success — Mary Anne Ramirez helped develop the pedagogy for our training and has ensured that we are able to have the impact and conceptual change among trainees that we are seeking.
Another contractor, Victor Conde, is an expert on international human rights and has been a huge champion of our programs across the human rights legal arena. He has often testified before the UN and other international organizations about the work we’re doing and helps us expand connections globally.
Are there three things the community, society, or politicians can do to help you address the root of the problem you are trying to solve?
1. Participate in Hardwired’s training! To instigate real change and to be effective models of pluralism within our communities, we must undergo a personal transformation ourselves. Our training program leads people to address the root causes of conflict by identifying possible misconceptions, biases and fears that we may hold about the rights and freedoms of others. For example, in our Fruitopia simulation which we utilize in our teacher–trainings, teachers are invited to experience their own conceptual change about pluralism before applying it in the classroom with their students.
2. Help us implement our education curriculum in more schools. After ten years, Hardwired’s program is now a full-scale model for human rights training and education. The program is empowering the next generation to rebuild a more peaceful and prosperous future for themselves and future generations all over the world. Following our success in countries like Iraq, Hardwired has presented our proof of impact to governments in other countries, several of which have invited us to implement our training and educational program in their schools, including the Ministries of Education in Kosovo, Lebanon and Jordan. In order to meet the needs in these countries and others, Hardwired requires financial support.
3. Our local and national officials can prioritize religious freedom as foreign and domestic policy. They and their constituents can become a voice for those who don’t have one and bring attention to religious freedom abuses abroad and here at home.
How would you articulate how a business can become more profitable by being more sustainable and more environmentally conscious? Can you share a story or example?
Hardwired is very conscience about the allocation of our resources. Most of our funding goes towards programs to maximize our impact in the countries where we work. We choose high-capacity, highly efficient individuals as staff who care deeply about this issue and therefore, we only need a small team to make a big impact.
We have seen that empowering local leaders in the countries where we work is the most sustainable approach to affecting long-lasting change. To this end, we have trained and employed “Master Trainers”, each with their own experiences of oppression and persecution, to replicate and expand our program within their communities. We have also built our program to require minimal materials so that leaders in challenging environments without access to an abundance of resources, can execute our programs simply and efficiently.
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
Making a positive impact on society by advancing freedom of belief or conscience affects the trajectory of the world more than one would imagine. Ensuring that people can live in dignity regardless of their religious background or belief systems, is the key to ensuring long-term economic stability, alleviating poverty, maintaining peaceful co-existence among diverse communities — the list goes on.
Think about the possibility of averting wars and genocide before they have the chance to materialize instead of having to bury millions of people and pouring billions of dollars into humanitarian aid and the rebuilding of brick and mortar. Simply by addressing the human conscience, it’s possible. We’ve seen it happen through our programs in some of the most difficult places. Making an impact in your community could mean changing the outcomes of thousands of others.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“Just because we’re different doesn’t make us enemies.” This is a quote from one of the students in our program. It continues to inspire and motivate me in my work because it demonstrates the intellectual capacities of the next generation, who will take the concepts we are teaching them through our program and lift their communities out of conflict to greater dignity, unity and freedom.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
I would choose to meet with Aga Khan, the spiritual leader of the Ismaili faith group. He is the embodiment of respect for religious freedom and tolerance of people of all backgrounds.
How can our readers follow you online?
Our website is www.hardwiredglobal.org and we are on most major social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube, where we keep our followers updated on all of our current work and impact daily.
This was very meaningful, thank you so much. We wish you only continued success on your great work!
Thank you for helping us spread the important message of freedom and pluralism to even more people!
Social Impact Heroes Helping Our Planet: Why & How Tina Ramirez Of Hardwired Global Is Helping To… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.