We talked to Joe Friel, one of Yalla's founders, about what Solidfund's intervention meant to them at the time - and what's happened since. [Click heading to read on]
"What stood out for us was the cooperative solidarity - and that it came though so quickly, which was really appreciated. In fact, the solidarity of other worker cooperators and supporters was decisive in Yalla's beginning. It was there through our early development, and it's at the heart of our strategy today. I think it shows shows we were right early on to embrace the worker cooperative model for what we were trying to build".
Joe who is based in the UK, Simon Dupree in Germany and Ramy Al Shurafa in Gaza came together in 2018 after completing tech bootcamps at Founders and Coders in London and Gaza Sky Geeks in the West Bank - two organisations championing tech training for social impact and cross-border collaboration.
Joe says: "We didn't even meet face to face for six months, but we came out of an ecosystem of collaborative training and organising. This is how we were able to quickly establish trust and come together around shared values and a mission to connect and work together across borders. Out first couple of commercial contracts came about as referrals from CoTech, the worker co-op technologists network. We got important support from other worker co-ops, including Agile Collective".
Today Yalla is a fairly fluid network of members and associates in Palestine, the UK and across Europe and the Americas. Their core team is around 20, and when the work supports it can involve up to 40.
The co-op has confronted many shocks, including the sudden death from heart failure of co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Ramy Al Shurafa last year. But now the co-op is working to set up a new legal trading entity in Ramallah, to make it easier to integrate employees, members and freelancers in Gaza and to expand Yalla's international client base. It's also looking to resource a new foundations-and-grants funded project, Yalla Labs, to expand into capacity building and solidarity consultancy work - to help mitigate the 'lumpiness' of deadline-driven projects, and nurture a more trauma-sensitive, longer horizon partnership base.