Every year on March 8th, International Women’s Day is celebrated all over the world.

SIE, Social Innovation Europe, Europe’s largest active social innovation community, is celebrating Women’s Day with a series of interviews with interesting women working on great social innovation projects across Europe.

Carolina Escobar Mejía, Somos Más Europe’s CEO and co-founder, is one of the interesting women that have been interviewed.

We are so proud of it!

Life is all about open and interconnected collaboration, not zero-sum game competition. The same is true about organizations, and organizational networks, which when you think about it, can also be considered as living entities. In Somos Más (which in spanish stands for We’re More), when we started in Bogotá, Colombia more than 15 years ago, we had an initial idea of interconnecting the work of social impact driven organizations. It bothered us that among the thousands of organizations that were working in similar topics, challenges, and even in the same neighborhoods, they usually didn’t know each other, were not aware or involved in relevant policy making processes, relevant research, and even less the services and learnings from each other. Many times this happened to them even when having a same funder. There was a feeling that the collective impact in topics like disabilities, ethnic minorities, homelessness, or any other social major issue, didn’t correspond with the number of organizations working on it.