"Our schools for the excluded. We encourage thought and freedom of expression'
The ceo of 'Still I Rise' tells the story and method of the association, which runs world-class schools for refugee and vulnerable children around the world
6' min read
6' min read
"We were among the very few in the world to open a school just as schools were closing". It was December 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, and Nicolò Govoni, with his organisation Still I Rise, inaugurated in Nairobi, Kenya, the first school certified as an IB World School (international baccalaureate) within a shantytown. A school of excellence, free of charge and aimed exclusively at refugee children and young people in the country's refugee camps.
He who today, at the age of 32, is president and CEO of a non-profit organisation that has opened six schools in as many countries and was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2018, but who has a school experience behind him that he himself describes as 'turbulent'. Or rather: 'disastrous'.
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What changed his destiny, after two failures and a move from the scientific high school to the linguistic high school, was a teacher, Nicoletta Fiorani, who believed in him 'when even I didn't believe in it', he recalls. "She saved my life, because she managed to stimulate a sense of responsibility in me". That sense of responsibility underpinned the choices that in 2018 led him to found - together with Giulia Cicoli and Sarah Ruzek - Still I Rise, the non-profit organisation that aims to offer world-class education to refugee and vulnerable children around the world. Today, the association has around 100 employees and 400 volunteers worldwide and, in its seven years of operation, has involved 70,000 children in its school programmes, with more than 150,000 hours of tuition. "If I had had a different kind of hardship as a boy, maybe I would be doing something else today. But having had difficulties in education, that is what I decided to commit myself to," says Govoni.
At the age of 20, he left for India with the idea of doing a few weeks of voluntary work in an orphanage in Tamil Nadu. "That experience was a watershed in my life, so much so that after finishing high school I returned to India, this time to Pune, to study at university, and stayed there for four years, until I graduated in journalism in 2017." Dates are not a detail in this story. During those four years, Nicolò returned to Tamil Nadu several times, for longer and longer periods. He became very close to the founder, Joshua, whom he describes as 'almost a second father to me', and to the children, particularly one, Anthony. But he also realises the limit of this way of volunteering (which in the industry is called 'volontourism'), which 'wasn't really doing people any good. It was good for me, but not for the children: for Anthony, my departure, every time, was a heartbreak, a new abandonment'. Again, a turning point: 'I like to think that, during those years, I went from being a tourist to becoming a volunteer: it sounds like a small thing, but it's not. I also trained in teaching because, through university, I was able to do an internship for Teach for India, part of a global movement called Teach for All'.Back to the dates: in April 2017 Nicolò graduated, with the prospect of enrolling in a master's degree in NGO management in New York. 'But life wanted me not to do that master's', he explains. In fact, the courses would not start until January 2018, so, not to sit on his hands, Govoni decided to do another stint as a volunteer, this time in Samos, Greece, in the refugee camp that housed Syrian refugees, where he was put to teach a class of 12-13 year-olds. Another dazzling experience: 'The situation was very serious, with a structure made for 650 people, which instead housed thousands, with peaks of 7,000 refugees at certain times and enormous inconveniences,' he recounts. There were no doctors or drinking water, you had to queue for three to six hours to eat, and the food was poor. There were no schools and no legal representation'.
In Samos, he met Giulia Cicoli and Sarah Ruzek and, together with them, he undertook to denounce the hotspot situation to the European Union and the UN, but the response was not what the three young people would have expected and, for this reason too, today Still I Rise by statute does not accept funds from governments or from supranational or multinational bodies that do not adhere to its code of ethics.
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