The invisible lines of connection

Think about the moments in your life that have shaped you. It's in these experiences where your most powerful personal stories live.

Our vision is to help communities build a culture of vulnerable leadership; the power that comes from increasing curiosity, inspiring a collective commitment to deep learning, and amplifying open and ongoing dialogue.

Vulnerable storytelling builds bonds that allows us to be honest when recounting complex experiences with social inequality and racial discrimination - while also leading us to better understand our own biases - a crucial part of getting to the root cause of an issue.

And before we can create solutions, we must uncover the root.

Storytelling often acts as a direct route to our emotions, and therefore, an important factor in our decision-making.

It creates meaning out of patterns. It unites communities. It brings rise toward empathy.

When it comes to changing the values, mindsets, rules, and goals of a system, our experiences -and how we communicate such- are extraordinarily foundational.

Everyone's story has the power to influence.

Using stories as a disruptive force for good

Why?

A systems approach means connecting personal stories to help answer complex questions, such as:

What are the conditions responsible for the problem?

What is the impact on wider society?

Is there a need to change laws, policies, and programs?

Who is working to change this?

What are the opportunities for
collective impact?

How?

Today, initiatives like The Guardian’s Modern-day Slavery in Focus project use personal stories to communicate systemic issues to large-scale audiences - oftentimes, directly leading to change.

Take the story they broke in September 2013 about the role of slave labor in World Cup construction in Qatar. Journalists uncovered how migrant workers, trapped in forced labor, were dying in unprecedented numbers.

After the story broke, FIFA Chief, Sepp Blatter, raised the issue with the Emir of Qatar, and the country promised to reform its labor laws.


The Modern-day Slavery team stayed on the story, a wider campaign developed, and in March 2016, the United Nations issued a warning that gave Qatar 12 months to end migrant worker slavery.

And in late 2017, the Qatari government committed to amending the law to help stop labor abuse.

Although there is still a long way to go when it comes to ending slave labor in Qatar, it is clear that illuminating the power of stories can motivate movements for systemic change.


Dig deeper, stay inspired.

Consider This:


Who most needs to hear your story?

What message do you want them to learn from your experience?

What does this story reveal about you and your values?.

If you knew your story could transform the world, would you tell it?

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Get Involved.

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How we operate:

As our position is focused on co-creating solutions, our approach champions effective altruism. We believe people should have the ability to donate passionately across multiple causes but effectively within these causes to produce the most consequential outcomes.

Collective action on any social issue requires attention to the ways digital regulations influence and shape every other policy domain. Often we see a fragmented or independent set of influences or individuals as the culprit toward exasperating an issue, however, to create solutions within a digital-dependent society, we have to address the fact that these digital systems are owned and managed by corporate and government entities. The need for a transparent and regulated code of ethics, as the baseline for digital development and intent of use, is absolutely necessary toward scaled social solutions.

Our fundraising is three-pronged. Please do not hesitate to reach out directly for a more comprehensive breakdown of each fundraising objective. In addition to a monthly donor report, we will host an open Zoom session each month to review these reports and speak candidly to these goals and produced outcomes.

Prong 1. Digital rights advocacy and protection.

Combatting disinformation and increasing digital and media literacy.

A lack of connection is one of the main contributing problems towards the isolation of communities and the acceptance of reality and facts. Communities need reliable, accurate news and access to factual information that creates the opportunity for dialogue, reflection, and informed decision-making.

By addressing the evolution of key digital systems, and developing a common understanding of practices used in such, we'll begin to shed light on the addictive and intentionally-designed digital tactics used to curate our google results, social media feed, and the ads we see. Underscoring the need to rethink how we consume and share information, the goal is to bring awareness, trigger a moment of pause, and stir curiosity towards confronting our digital addictions and the subsequent repercussions of such.

Up first:

A. Awareness towards the rise of ISP (internet service provider) and media monopolies over our local and regional news.

B. The need to advocate for transparent ethical standards in behavioral analysis, predictive analytics, responsible data collection, including corporate and government commitments toward the funding of ethical data infrastructure.

The plan, in-part:

Increased collaboration across organizations and issue areas to levy an awareness campaign that brings attention to digital problems by reinforcing the interconnected threats to our collective communities, particularly within marginalized and rural communities. We often may overlook the relationship between algorithms and socio-economic, environmental, and public health issues, but by organizing collective power through a shared goal, we have an opportunity to push for real change.

Partnerships with tech leaders within the social impact sectors, and creating an open-communication access point between our campaign and experts in the digital protection and national security space.

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