New Diaspora, greek diaspora New Diaspora New Diaspora started out as a digital storytelling platform, focusing on the new generation of Greeks living abroad during the crisis in their homeland. Since then, New Diaspora has been gradually evolving into a participatory media channel that records a migration wave as it happens. Its goal is to engage, connect and inspire democratic dialogue and cross-fertilisation of ideas, eventually crystallising the collective pulse of a “borderless nation”. In June 2014, New Diaspora became a registered Foundation (Stichting) under Dutch law. Mission At least 300,000 Greeks have abandoned their country during the last seven years of continuous recession. Adding up to the thousands of well-educated and multilingual Greek expats that left before the crisis broke out, they are part of an unprecedented global mobility of skilled employees and entrepreneurs. Together with the millions of their compatriots from past migration waves, the Greek “neomigrants” mainly use the internet to keep in touch with each other and their people back home; engaging on multiple levels with an economic, political and social imbalance that seems to be far from over yet. And at the same time experiencing an alternate reality, where the economy, culture and climate often prove to be beyond their initial expectations. What binds these people together is a collective identity, which can only be revealed and redefined within the context of an all-embracing community. Launched in March 2013, New Diaspora started out as a digital storytelling platform, focusing on the new generation of Greeks living abroad during the crisis in their homeland. In June 2014, New Diaspora became a registered Foundation under Dutch law, and is now gradually evolving into a participatory media channel that aspires to empower Greek “neomigrants” by: creating a global online community and connecting it to relevant groups, organisations and businesses producing and distributing a series of web documentaries commissioning and publishing news stories, interviews and other forms of audiovisual and interactive content hosting a variety of creative user generated content organising live-streamed conferences, film screenings and networking events developing an online platform for democratic dialogue, and forming work groups that will seek solutions for change facilitating the promotion of innovative ideas and social causes that relate to the Greek crisis New Diaspora aims to tell the complex story of a migration wave in real time, and also to engage, connect and inspire democratic dialogue and cross-fertilisation of ideas, eventually crystallising the collective pulse of a “borderless nation”. In order to achieve this, New Diaspora addresses the need for both: A participatory source of global content, relevant to the current Greek migration flow, its causes, its consequences and its future A point of reference and social interaction, that will enable its community members to connect and discover ways to collaborate with each other New Diaspora crosses the line that conventionally separates content providers from consumers. Users turn into participants, eventually becoming co-authors of their collective narrative. Not only do we tell our story together, but we are also writing the script of the story we want to tell together. We become the story. By making it a story worth told, we can also become the change.