At Soliya, our mission is to empower young adults to establish more cooperative and compassionate relations between their societies by combining the power of dialogue with the reach of new media technologies.

While we are living in a time of unprecedented threats and challenges, we are also living in a time of unprecedented opportunity. We now have tools that can connect us as never before. Like any tools however their ultimate impact depends on how we use them.

We believe that best-practices in dialogue from the field of conflict resolution present models that can and should be applied through these new tools to ensure interactions are constructive and promote deeper understanding and empathy.

In doing that, we focus our efforts on young adults, particularly those who are in higher education or active in civil society, because we believe that they are not only the leaders of tomorrow but also the change-makers of today. Youth have consistently been the driving force behind major social change movements, and that is only more true in this era of new media technologies, which they are always the first to master.

If we can enable a critical mass of these potential “influencers” in Western & predominantly Muslim societies to have profound cross-cultural experiences, then we believe the dominant paradigm for how our societies approach their differences would be one defined by cooperation & compassion instead of confrontation & coercion.

If so, then there would be fewer cross-cultural “sparks” such as pastors burning Korans, educated youth resorting to terrorism or governments ordering pre-emptive attacks. And when there is a spark, “influencers” in political, media, military & religious institutions would use their leverage to ensure their societies react reasonably in a way that does not violate the basic dignity or human rights of the other society.

In short, we would live in a world in which the governing question for approaching cross-cultural relations would be how do we meet the basic needs of us and them, not us or them.