Voices that deserved witness

Every person in these projects had something worth saying. Most of them had never been asked.

Across twenty-five years in many countries, I have found people who existed outside the frame of what their society considered worth listening to. I have given them a form, a platform, and a witness. This is not a service I invented. It is what I have always done, without even noticing what I was doing.

Rodrigo

Once, mugged at gunpoint by a young man on drugs, we ended up talking for forty-five minutes about our lives. I was volunteering to launch the Big Issue in my home town, so I offered to take him to an addiction service and give him a job with the Big Issue if he handed over the gun. He returned my phone so he could call me if he took me up on it. He said he'd only call if he had the strength to throw the gun in the river. When we parted, he asked me for a hug. We didn't talk again.

Published voices

Starting from scratch - Buenos Aires, 2000. URL magazine, Argentina:

As head editor of an Argentine technology and culture magazine, I planned a series of interviews with unknown people (not public figures, not celebrities) who spoke candidly about their lives and posed on their own terms.

The series included a Black Brazilian immigrant mother speaking about race, identity, and being stereotyped; and a trans woman who worked in prostitution because, as she said, no one gave jobs to trans women. This was in 2000 in Argentina. Neither "trans" nor "sex worker" was yet in common use.

My employers didn't want these voices in a mainstream magazine, but they accepted my decision.

Defensores del Chaco - Buenos Aires, 2005. Supporter magazine, the Netherlands:

A football club founded in Moreno - one of the poorest districts of Buenos Aires - during the factory closures of the 1990s. Its founders built it to keep the children from the unemployed off the streets, where drug-dealing gangs competed for them.

I interviewed the founders and gave their story a published form that reached European audiences through a Dutch NGO publication.

Peace Cycle - London to Palestine, 2005.
Supporter magazine, the Netherlands:

Laura Abraham founded the Peace Cycle in 2004, a volunteer initiative cycling from London to Jerusalem to bear witness to the daily reality of Palestinian civilians. I interviewed her at length, and the published piece treated the political complexity honestly and the human stories at its centre with care.

The article gave the initiative reach across an European NGO network that would not otherwise have encountered it.

The immigrant community builder - Paris. Website and Comms support:

A Latin American woman organised her students and volunteers to raise 90,000 euros to feed children in Buenos Aires after the 2001 banking crisis.

She was living on the outskirts of Paris, running sewing lessons for immigrant and isolated women through her local council, and started organising her students around causes and events that showed the levels of hidden creativity those women had.

I built her a website that made her couture skills visible as a tribute to her creativity and community-building talent. The archived site is at: https://emigradas.wixsite.com/ciuffo-studio

The hidden sociologist - Bolivia-Perú.
Publisher/designer of her 3 books and her author's website

A Peruvian woman, immigrant and university-educated sociologist working as a hairdresser in Bolivia due to economic and systemic barriers.

I identified her potential and supported her by editing and publishing 3 books on subjects she alone chose, and building her an author website. I watched one of those books reach 68,000 followers organically on social media.

She wrote every word. First, I gave her the belief, then, the architecture. the editorial process and a platform. The results belong to her. That's how I work.

I found a woman who raised 90,000 euros for children during a foreign national crisis and was entirely invisible. I found a sociologist who had 68,000 people wanting to read her. Only circumstances kept them in the dark. I did what I could to make them seen.

This is my vocation: being curious about and conversing with people, then giving a platform to those stories that I think matter to build the world I want my daughter to live in.

What colleagues have said

Anna Nayyar, Associate Director, Britain Thinks

"Angeles has been the most formidable force driving the equality movement - both in research and in digital campaigning."

Anna Peters, Director, Stripe Partners:

"I have learnt a lot from her on the importance of true community: her community-minded spirit comes through in both the way that she treats the online communities that she manages, and in the way that she treats her colleagues."

Jens Middel, Owner, Schrijf-Schrijf, Utrecht: