How EqualReach supports refugees through gig work

Giselle Gonzales is the bright-eyed, long-haired founder and CEO of EqualReach, a freelance marketplace for refugees who can code, design websites, make TikTok videos and Instagram Reels, and know their way around social media. Supported by philanthropy and impact investments, the relatively new social enterprise is like a fair-trade version of Upwork, dedicated to “protecting, rather than exploiting, the world’s most marginalized communities. They have incredible skills that most nonprofits or businesses don’t realize exist,” Gonzales said, flashing a wide smile.

I met Gonzales in April in the lobby lounge of the Randolph Hotel Oxford, U.K. She was fresh off a talk about her social purpose start-up at The Sidebar, a collection of impact-focused events running alongside the official sessions of the Skoll World Forum, which took place late last month. The daughter of a pastor and missionary now living in Oxford, Gonzales started EqualReach in December 2023. She was inspired by her own time spent as a freelancer documenting the mass migration of Syrian refugees to Germany in 2015 and 2016 as well as research she conducted for her master’s degree at the University of Edinburgh, focusing on the economic and digital inclusion of refugees, information she later applied while working at Amazon Web Services and Amazon Sustainability.

While at Amazon, she was managing the type of gig work most refugees struggle to access. Through partners including the International Trade Centre and Norwegian Refugee Council, she connected graduates from their IT upskilling courses to digital work projects from her internal team at Amazon. Over the course of three years at Amazon, she saw both the significant business and social impact of this work, and as she said “word started to spread.” Then she hit a block. “When other business leaders asked how they could work with refugee talent too, [there was] no digital infrastructure to connect businesses to talent, no way to easily do the matching, procurement, contracting or payments,” Gonzales said. “Opportunity is the missing piece.” She left Amazon to create EqualReach to address this lack. “It was a culmination of about 10 years leading up to this, seeing a gap we could fill.”

Gonzales secured her first philanthropic money for EqualReach in 2023 in the form of a prize: $3,000 from the Social Shifters Global Innovation Challenge. Supported by Amazon, the challenge gives competitive grant-funding awards to social-impact- and climate-focused founders between the ages of 18 and 30. Gonzales went on to collect more prize-based grants: €10,000 as the winner of the Santander X Global Challenge, a competition designed to support start-ups and scale-ups focused on building the digital economy, and £7,500 as a finalist in the U.K.-based Ford Family Foundation’s Ignite Social Enterprise Competition. (Not to be confused with the Ford Foundation or the Oregon-based Ford Family Foundation; the U.K.’s Ford Family Foundation supports social enterprise.)  

After choosing EqualReach as a finalist in the 2024 competition, the Ford Family Foundation invested capital in the start-up. This became EqualReach’s pre-seed funding. “They loved what we were doing and wanted to support us further,” Gonzales said. “The Ford Family Foundation is truly aligned. They’ve been a wonderful partner. Any money we return to them gets reinvested in other social enterprises. Ford Family Foundation is our first investor. I expect we’ll raise future funds and bring on more.”

Laura Pulleyn, managing director of Ford Family Foundation, said the foundation sees investing in social enterprises as a progressive form of philanthropy that can make a huge difference in the lives of marginalized people. “By providing patient capital and expertise to mission-led ventures such as EqualReach, we can enable job creation, advance social and financial equity, and enable solutions to scale, delivering genuinely transformative outcomes for some of the most disadvantaged communities,” Pulleyn said.

EqualReach has also garnered traditional philanthropic support, including a $20,000 grant from the Swiss-based Z Zurich Foundation, the philanthropy of the Zurich Insurance Group. Other grants have come from Bosch and Mercy Corps.

Like Airbnb.org, EqualReach is a social impact organization tapping technology to accelerate the pace of restabilization for refugees and other displaced people. Also, in a similar way to to Airbnb.org, foundations dedicated to rare disease research, and hybrid funders like CZI, its use of grants and investments highlights the ongoing appetite of many in the philanthrosphere to leverage all tools available — including grants, prize money and the investment of endowment funds. We’re also seeing wealth management entities such as family offices take a similar wide-net approach to social change, using impact investing, grants and political donations to influence the trajectory of a range of causes.

Why gig work is elusive for refugees

Stories of refugees are in the news because record numbers of people are displaced due to conflict, violence, persecution, political instability, human rights violations and climate change. According to the U.N. Refugee Agency, as of the end of June 2025 (the most recent reporting period) nearly 120 million people were displaced around the world, including refugees, those displaced within their own countries, and those seeking asylum.

All of them could likely use work. Matching displaced people with remote work seems obvious in some ways — after all, you don’t need a permanent address to create content or code. In practice, however, a slew of barriers makes it nearly impossible for many refugees to find, land and/or get paid for virtual assignments. While pretty much any citizen in the U.S. can log on and bid for a job on a site like Upwork, displaced people often lack the required form of identification necessary to register on digital platforms, such as a passport or driver’s license. They may have a form of ID provided by the U.N. Refugee Agency, a UNHCR card, which most platforms don’t accept, Gonzales said.

Platforms that do accept UNHCR cards present other challenges for refugees. Many freelance platforms don’t operate in the countries where refugees may be living, Gonzales said. Upwork, for example, restricts access in countries that are under international sanctions or have legal constraints or other security concerns. Blocked countries currently include Russia, Belarus, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Syria and the Ukrainian regions of Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk. For individuals living under repressive regimes and/or crushing economic sanctions, blacklisting means they cannot tap into the global digital economy as a way to survive.

Then there are problems with payment. Digital fintech platforms also don’t work everywhere. Paypal, which operates in more than 200 countries and territories, is completely suspended in Russia and banned or severely restricted in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Iraq, Iran, Liberia, Libya, Myanmar, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen and parts of the Caribbean and Central America.

Finally, potential employers may lack confidence in the reliability or skill of a contract worker who they envision as camping out in a temporary shelter — if they consider refugee workers at all. This fear reflects a misunderstanding of the refugee population, which includes many people who have been displaced for a couple decades, during which time they’ve found stable housing and built strong portfolios, Gonzales said. “They spend those years getting skilled, doing training, having stacks of certificates.”

As Gary Shaughnessy, chair of the Z Zurich Foundation, said in a press release about EqualReach’s work, “We may assume that what displaced people need is purely help, when what they may actually need is opportunity. They can add tremendous value to build our society.”

How philanthropy can help refugees overcome barriers to employment

EqualReach partners with intermediary organizations such as nonprofits, NGOs or other social enterprises focused on offering technical training and other support for refugees. It then thoroughly vets the skills and talents of these organizations’ teams of refugee freelancers. “We also vet for their ability to receive payments and for fair working practices,” Gonzales said. “We hold a very high bar for fair, nonexploitative digital work. Refugees are the most at-risk for not being able to access work in the digital economy and for being exploited.” EqualReach manages the back end and processes payment, making its money by taking a standard 10% to 15% project fee. 

So far, it has contracted with refugee-led and refugee-supporting partners in more than a dozen countries, including Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, the Palestinian territories and Jordan. Freelancers have found work mostly in the U.S., U.K. and E.U., though some opportunities have arisen from other countries around the world. EqualReach is still in start-up mode, making both traditional philanthropy and impact investments important for its growth. Gonzales sees philanthropy in particular as key to de-risking the model in the most challenging locales, “those near the bottom of the economic ladder. It gives us that margin to lean more into that social mission.”  

EqualReach also pitches foundations, offering the services of refugee gig workers to do their or their grantees’ social media, websites and back-end management. “If the dollars spent on that technology can also be creating jobs for refugees, it’s a win for the organization, the funder and the refugee,” Gonzales said. “A lot of nonprofits find it to be beneficial for their funding strategy if they can say, ‘We are driving impact not only in the work we do, but also how we deliver our work.’ Especially in a tight funding ecosystem, where everyone is trying to find a way to stand out to funders, this is a way for a nonprofit to do so. Our own social media is managed by a team out of Uganda. So you can see the quality of it. They know our brand and it is at a great price.”

As Amy Fallon, associate innovation officer at UNHCR, said in a press release about the organization’s approach, “Placing a cohort of tech-skilled refugees at a Fortune 50 company in London has shown that the stigma around recruiting displaced people is not an insurmountable barrier, and these vetted teams are proving they are more than capable of bridging the digital skills gap in the U.K. job market.”

This is Gonzales’ vision, too. “This is an approach that creates actual system change. That’s what I’m most excited about. We want to change the way the private sector outsources for good.”