Taking ownership for people in need
Meet Christian, a part-time product owner at Corti and a Computer Science student at the Technical University of Denmark. Like so many people at Corti, Christian continuously inspires the rest of the organization with his passion for taking ownership inside and outside work.
During Corti's monthly Coffee and Competencies, the wider organization got the chance to learn more about a new project he started early in 2022, only a few weeks after joining.
In February 2022, the war in Ukraine broke out, leaving many asking themselves how they could help. Christian was one of those people, and after almost two months at Corti, he had to shift his focus as he got the opportunity to co-found Blue Yellow Buses—an organization helping people find safety in Denmark.
Christian started his journey by researching what he could do to help Ukrainians. After participating in donating clothes to the Red Cross and creating a website to help spread awareness, Christian realized that those areas weren't where the biggest need was.
We’d never seen a refugee crisis like this before. But I knew there was a clear need for people to find safety in a professional and organized way.
Initially, Blue Yellow Buses was just a group of 7 people trying to figure out how to make bus transportation to Denmark work. Christian had no idea that this would end in him heading the organization, which would have a headcount of over 150 volunteers.
For the next ten weeks, Christian—alongside his sister and other 150+ volunteers—spent every day learning about the complexities of cross-country migration, which included immigration law in various countries, ensuring supplies for buses, people coordination, crisis communication, and fundraising.
It was definitely a learning experience. There were so many new things that I was facing and had to learn about, such as everything about immigration laws. Or how we could create a software platform that ensured that the journey would be safe, transparent, and efficient. There were always new things coming up that I wouldn't have even considered before starting it. But we knew that someone had to do it—so it might as well be us.
After fundraising north of $140.000, Blue Yellow Buses and its 150+ volunteers were able to send 25 buses to Poland, helping over 1000 Ukrainians (and let's not forget the 62 pets, too!) find safety in Denmark, and all this happened in less than ten weeks.
Stories like Christian's make it easy for us to explain exactly what it is we value in the people we work with; when faced with the opportunity, he took ownership of a project that ended up helping over 1000 Ukrainian people with families, pets, and loved ones. It’s an understatement when we say we're proud to have him on our team.
During his presentation to the Corti team, Christian articulated that a small group of individuals can bring remarkable ideas to fruition, which we couldn't agree with more.
