PeaceNexus supports Build Up, a peacebuilding innovator, with conscious and sustainable organisational growth management.
The Partner
Build Up is an innovator, expertise provider and policy advisor. Over the past 8 years, through its work across 15+ countries, it has demonstrated that participatory approaches and digital tools can play an essential role in overcoming polarisation and other threats to social cohesion, especially if driven by the values and principles of peacebuilding.
Its work is organised around three core programs: digital technologies for peace, transforming conflict in digital spaces, and participatory processes. To support of these programmes, Build Up also develops policy and research on the uses of digital technology for peace, delivers online and in-person training courses, and hosts a global community of practice around peace and technology, convened at an annual conference.
Build Up’s expertise and programmatic work is meeting a growing demand and, as a result, its budget has gone up tenfold since 2014. Now managing multiple projects around the world, the team was seeking to revise its organisational model, decision-making and internal processes in a way that would increase efficiency while still upholding its core principles. Build Up has always understood itself as a value-driven collective, modelling participatory decision-making and leadership.
Our Support
The organisational change process is defined around three change objectives:
- To strengthen Build Up’s ability to communicate its programmatic work and method across multiple audiences, including, tracking the impact of its individual program areas to better demonstrate and communicate organisational level impact.
- To support Build Up’s ability to lead new modalities of peacebuilding program design and implementation, contributing to a shift of power away from international actors and towards local actors. It does that by continuing to test and develop new methodologies and tools to enable the co-design from the ground up in collaboration with partners.
- To help Build Up further operationalize its internal structure in a way that democratizes the organisational functions and responsibility of maintaining Build Up, without leading to burn out.
First results
- An evaluation of Build Up’s Peace Innovators program was conducted which enabled the introduction of some changes to its model while demonstrating the benefit of a participatory evaluation approach. Investments were also made to make Build Up’s website more accessible and inclusive.
- Build Up developed an open-source social media analysis tool that empowers local peacebuilders to conduct their own social media analysis and inform programming based on a data-driven understanding of the narrative emerging and interacting on social media platforms.
- Build Up designed a new model for internal coordination of organisational tasks grounded in the principles of collective leadership and participatory decision-making. The organisation has trialled the system for over a year and is now iterating and improving on the model. It is reporting that the changes have allowed the organisation to become better organised, efficient, and therefore free up more time and resources for actual programming on the ground
Way forward
The next phase will enable Build Up to test out the recommendations that have emerged from its evaluation, piloting new modalities to engage with local peacebuilding actors through a “fellows in residence” pilot programme.
Build up will also develop communication materials to share its organisational model and methods for learning and operating as a collective. In November 2022, it convened 15 like-minded peacebuilding organisations to discuss alternative organising principles. This successful convening has inspired it to renew joint advocacy efforts to challenge the traditional donor-funder relationships and shift imbalanced power dynamics within the peacebuilding field.