We are doing an interview on Zoom. The Covid-19 virus is still very much in evidence. Natasha Freidus (“Tasha”) opens up her computer and she appears!
“Hey Tasha, how are you? We haven’t spoken in a while.” You see, her mom is best friends with my wife, Judie from their days at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and I’ve known Tasha since she was in grade school. I even went to her high school graduation because they lived in our town, Chappaqua, NY. I should say, we moved to THEIR town, since they were living here before us.
I tell her that I want to do a “cover shot” using the Zoom computer screen because it is only fitting given the circumstances in which we are all still sort of locked down even though we still go out and do errands with masks and gloves. I have even done a few corporate head shots with everyone in the studio trying to practice social distancing as much as possible.
“You’ll have to wait a minute while I put on some lipstick and fix my hair a bit,” she says, as her screen goes black for a few seconds.
“No problem,” I said. As I waited, I quickly went over a few questions I wanted to ask her. She comes back on the screen. “So, let’s begin somewhat at the beginning. I know you run something called ‘Needs List’, but what in your childhood and formative years started you thinking along these lines”?
“Well, I grew up in a kind sheltered suburb and when I was a senior in high school, I convinced my parents to let me go on a trip to Thailand. That was in 1990.” Tasha went on to say that she did some volunteer work in a refugee camp there and her views on social justice became really cemented. She studied International Relations at MIT, and worked in Tucson, Arizona as a community organizer and teacher of English and Citizenship. While in Arizona, she became more interested in policy as it related to how government treats various groups of people. While at MIT, Tasha also worked in the field of Urban Studies and began her first entrepreneurial venture called “Creative Narrations.”
The focus of this business was to aid various groups of people in being able to tell their particular story using computer technology. Around 2010, Tasha went out to Silicon Valley to help folks at Hewlett-Packard and some university non-profit agencies learn how to tell their stories. Much of this was on-line training, Tasha said. She also got involved with some of her customers who were working on immigration issues.
She didn’t really have the idea for “Needs List” until she had moved her family to France in 2013, for a change of pace. She wanted to go to a rural area of France, rather than settle in Paris, also because she wanted to live in the countryside and experience what life was like there. While dropping her kids off at school, she was asked by another parent to come with her to a town called Beziers, France to help some people there. It was there that she saw people who were in need of household items like diapers, clothing and other sundries. She got the idea to post some of these “needs” on Facebook to see if she could get any response. Well, she got a lot of responses.
Interview with
Natasha Freidus,
Co-founder and CEO of “Needs List”
by William Lulow