“What matters to young people from migrant backgrounds, and what do they need to reach their full potential?”

This community brings together very different lives and experiences. START therefore wants more than headline figures about its current and former scholarship holders. It wants to understand what has shaped them. Which stages of their lives mattered most? What opportunities and obstacles do they meet? Where does the foundation help most? What is on their minds today? What do they want from the foundation and from the community as a whole, and how would they like to contribute themselves?

To answer these questions, Zeitgeist Labs is developing a multilingual, biographical approach to qualitative research. It gives people room to describe their lives and what they need now, in their own words. If they wish, they can speak in the language in which they can describe their experiences most precisely. The resulting data goes far deeper than a standardised survey.

In the Intelligence Dashboard, many individual stories show recurring patterns, shared needs and differences between life paths or generations, without losing the individual voice. START gains an increasingly detailed picture of its community and can feed what it learns into its community work, mentoring and educational programmes as it goes.