When I moved to Amsterdam, I was focusing on starting a new life: finding my next career opportunity, developing my skills, meet new people and find myself in a new country. Co-founding and joining The Symbiosis Foundation was not part of the plan. It began as an idea to amplify collaboration and connect changemakers and organizations who care about making a social impact.

At the beginning, we believed that reaching out to organizations would naturally help our ecosystem grow. We invested time in cold outreach and community-building efforts, and soon we realized that collaboration requires clear value proposition and structure. That realization led us to shift our focus. We began developing our own Accelerator program that aimes to support early-stage social initiatives. The idea was to provide a focused, practical environment where founders and teams can strengthen their strategy, structure their ideas and build meaningful connections while working on their socially impactful projects.

Working on Symbiosis shaped me and taught me many lessons along the way. Building something from scratch might look exciting from the outside, but most of the work happens behind the scenes, quietly. People don’t see the consistent, intentional work – refining the website, improving messaging, testing ideas that may or may not work. There is rarely immediate feedback, and there is no perfect master plan to follow. The whole journey teaches you discipline from the very beginning. Thanks to Symbiosis, I expanded my skill set in ways I did not initially plan. I learned how to build and manage websites, improved my communication, developed a stronger sense of how strategy translates into execution, and became more active on social media. These were not skills I consciously set out to develop, but they became necessary as Symbiosis evolved.

When you build something without immediate validation, you inevitably question if you are moving in the right direction. No visible results right away, but you realize that growth comes from trusting the process, from continuing even when progress feels incremental. Symbiosis has been a space for me where I have been able to explore and develop a more entrepreneurial side of myself.