This Young Entrepreneur Is Empowering Gen Z to Have Conversations That Matter

Sophie Beren believes that "from conversation, real change can happen." That’s why she founded The Conversationalist, a "multimedia content platform and community designed to empower young people everywhere to have conversations that matter."

Raised in Wichita, Kansas, Sophie was the only Jewish person in her high school class. While she valued interacting with people with backgrounds different from hers, she also felt isolated. “I constantly felt like the ‘other,’” she says.

She started her undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was excited to be a part of a larger Jewish community. But Sophie quickly realized that her enthusiasm for joining a group of people like her resulted in a lack of interaction with people who were different. She observed that it seemed to her the same was true for most students on campus. “All of my friends were doing the same thing, but with their respective ‘identity groups,’” she says.

In her sophomore year, Sophie started a club called TableTalk. The goal of TableTalk was to bring students together from different walks of life and encourage them to break out of their “bubbles.” As Sophie puts it, this lack of connection between students was a kind of “common cold” that spanned many college campuses, and soon, TableTalk had branches at over 80 colleges and high schools.

But one question still remained in Sophie’s mind: Why? Why is it that millennials and Gen Z struggle to have difficult conversations? After getting a master's degree in nonprofit leadership at UPenn, Sophie conducted market research and found that young people don’t want to talk about difficult topics because they don’t know enough about them.

“There wasn’t really anything in the space that could help Gen Z have conversations that matter,” Sophie says.

And so The Conversationalist was launched in 2019.

The Conversationalist started as a multimedia content platform, designed to enable users to discuss the biggest issues this generation faces. But as Sophie describes, content like articles, videos, and podcasts can feel “two-dimensional.” After about six months of this model, she and her team decided to include a more community-based approach. In June, they launched their digital community on an app, powered by Geneva, through which users can chat about different topics in real time. In its first two months, the app has been an incredible success, and Sophie looks forward to continuing to expand it.

Regarding the impact of her work, Sophie says that she has seen The Conversationalist foster genuine human connection. “We’ve seen real relationships forming,” she says, “[between] people from across the country. People who you would not have otherwise met … People who have different political ideologies and come from completely different backgrounds.”

While she wouldn’t wish hardship on anyone, Sophie recognizes that racism, the inequalities highlighted by the pandemic, and other issues of 2020 have further fueled The Conversationalist’s mission. “We’re able to utilize the momentum on these topics to further conversation,” she says.

And as much as this year has made The Conversationalist more relevant, it has also made it more vital.

“Our generation has become the loneliest generation,” Sophie says. Some have coined Gen Z as the generation that is the most likely to suffer from, and be vocal about, mental health issues. In a reality where people are increasingly isolated and quarantined, fostering meaningful connections has made The Conversationalist platform more important than ever.

But while the pandemic has also made life difficult for Gen Z, Sophie has noticed a silver lining. “Typically, during the year, when everyone is at school and so busy with all of their extracurriculars, there isn’t a lot of time and space to sit down and have these conversations. [Now] we’re able to provide more hands-on opportunities to talk.”

On a personal level, Sophie says that her work reflects her own feelings and experiences.

“I’ve been trying to be more vulnerable about the fact that The Conversationalist is a manifestation of me,” she says. “It’s a reflection of all the topics I’ve struggled to speak about because I never felt like I had a space to dive into [them]. Whether it’s mental health, or body image, or racism … being able to talk about these things has been very humbling for me and has made me realize that there are people out there who have experienced similar things.”

As with everything these days, the future is uncertain. But Sophie hopes to continue evolving The Conversationalist brand to meet the needs of the present moment. The core mission of The Conversationalist, to unify the world and be the “go-to destination to amplify Gen Z voices,” will never change. But going forward, Sophie is exploring ways to shift The Conversationalist from just a conversation platform to an action-oriented endeavor. Indeed, it seems like a natural next step.

“Conversations can only go so far, unless they’re followed up with action,” she says.