On the Ground

The Alliance for Public Health was founded on 1 December 2000, originally as an international technical assistance project supported by the United States Agency for International Development and the European Union. It started in Ukraine and now works across the whole of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. For twenty-five years it has stayed with a small set of issues: HIV, tuberculosis, hepatitis, an...

May First Movement Technology is a member-owned cooperative operating in New York and Mexico City. Members pay dues and get email, mailing lists, web hosting, document collaboration and video meetings; hosting isn't a product it sells but a benefit of membership. By its own account, more than 800 organizations entrust their digital infrastructure to it, and for over 20 years it has run that infras...

The Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF) was registered in Delhi, India, on December 16, 2002; its founder, Osama Manzar, has a background in physics. In his words, DEF was never a digital foundation, but a communication-based organization that uses digital as a tool and a medium. Its best-known approach is the SoochnaPreneur ("information entrepreneur") program, launched in 2016 with seed funding...

Practical Action was founded in Britain in 1966 by the economist E. F. Schumacher, author of *Small Is Beautiful*; originally called ITDG, it took its current name in 2005. Its Nepal office has worked on flood early warning since 2002, when it put up a watchtower and installed a siren in the village of Bhandara, in Chitwan — Nepal's first community-based flood early warning system. At the time, go...

In 1999, eleven older neighbors on Beacon Hill in Boston met and decided "we're not going anywhere." Over the following year, they turned that sentence into a nonprofit — Beacon Hill Village, founded in 2001, welcoming its first members in 2002. Members pay an annual fee in exchange for "one phone call handles everything": rides, home repairs, appointment companions, tech help, all arranged by the...

In 2017, a group of young French people opposed to the "Uberization" of food delivery met each other during a street movement and decided, instead of accommodating the platforms, to build their own delivery software — the starting point of CoopCycle, a federation of bike-delivery cooperatives. All of the federation's code is open, but the right to use it commercially is reserved for cooperatives t...

In March 2018, Nathalie Dijkman, a Dutch criminologist, founded SEMA — "speak up" in Swahili — in Kampala, Uganda. She had previously worked as an East Africa program coordinator at a legal-innovation organization in The Hague, and her research kept her based in Uganda for long stretches. She found that a 2019 Transparency International survey showed nearly half of Ugandans who had used a public s...

In 2012, Blair Glencorse founded Accountability Lab in Kathmandu, Nepal. He had previously worked at the World Bank studying fragile states, and had spent years asking young people around the world what they thought the biggest problem was — the answer he heard back, again and again, pointed to a single word: accountability. People in power needed to be held responsible, and corruption needed to s...

Founder George Netscher watched his grandmother and aunt both develop Alzheimer's, and he knew his own mother would likely face it too. So he made a decision: while there was still time, build her better care technology. The idea grew directly out of his PhD research at UC Berkeley's AI Research Lab — it took shape in 2014, and the company was formally founded in 2016. SafelyYou's core model is si...

In 2011, Spain's 15M movement swept the country — young people occupied Madrid's Puerta del Sol chanting "They don't represent us." Part of that movement later won political power in cities including Barcelona, but ran into a real problem: having campaigned on "participatory democracy," how do you actually get citizens to participate? Barcelona's city government first ran a fork of Consul, an open...

In 2022, Neal Shah — a former hedge fund partner in New York — wound down his fund after his wife was diagnosed with cancer, and spent two years as her full-time caregiver. During that time, he discovered that nearby college students studying nursing and pre-med were a more reliable source of care than traditional home-care agencies — but the practice was entirely informal, with no background chec...

In 2002, two MIT students, Jonathan Jackson and Vikram Kumar, flew to Zambia intending to use health informatics to analyze data — and discovered there was no data to analyze at all. That discovery quickly pushed the company from health informatics toward global health software development: they first built electronic data-collection tools for clinicians in hospitals, then around 2008 shifted towa...

"Harambee" is Swahili for "let's all pull together." In 2011, Nicola Galombik incubated the initiative inside Yellowwoods, a South African investment group, with the National Treasury's Jobs Fund providing the first matched grant. The insight behind it was blunt: among South Africans aged 18 to 34, one in two is NEET — not in education, employment, or training, with no formal work history to put o...

Drinkwell grew out of a laboratory breakthrough. Bangladesh's groundwater naturally contains arsenic, and the World Health Organization estimates that twenty to forty-five million people nationwide drink arsenic-contaminated groundwater year-round — a crisis it has called "the largest mass poisoning of a population in history." In 2012, Bangladeshi American Minhaj Chowdhury, environmental engineer...

Ushahidi was founded in 2008 in Nairobi. In December 2007, Kenya's presidential election erupted into a fraud dispute, and the country fell into violence — more than a thousand people died, three hundred thousand were displaced, and traditional media couldn't keep pace with events. Kenyan lawyer Ory Okolloh asked one question on her blog: was there a techie willing to build a mashup plotting where...

M-KOPA was founded in 2010 in Nairobi. Its three co-founders — Nick Hughes, Jesse Moore, and Chad Larson — spotted a paradox: 70% of Kenyans had no bank account, yet 90% had mobile coverage, and the mobile money system M-Pesa was already moving money at scale. The question was what ordinary people could actually buy with it. Their answer was light: a $200 solar home system, financed through a GSM...

BRAC began in 1972, in the ruins of Bangladesh's war of independence. Fazle Hasan Abed quit his accounting job in the UK to return home and help with relief work — only to find that handouts didn't solve the problem: after three months of food aid, people were still hungry. In 1974, he met a group of village women pooling money to buy a goat, and from that grew BRAC's core idea, the "lowest thresh...

Aiyouxi began in 2009 as a public-welfare theatre troupe — over 300 volunteers writing, directing, and filming short films on causes like blood donation. Along the way the team realized that "what happens outside the camera matters more than what's in the frame," and in 2011 it formally became a community social-work organization, putting down roots in the old courtyards of Chengdu's Shuijingfang...

Crisis Text Line, founded in 2013, is the first and largest text-based crisis service in the United States. We believe everyone in crisis deserves to be heard. Through a nationwide network of trained volunteer counselors, we provide free, confidential, 24/7 crisis support via text to millions globally. Text HOME to 741741 and connect with a counselor in 38 seconds—far faster than the 10+ minute av...

31 staff. 22,000 families. 6 cities. 47 communities. Over twenty years, Shanghai's Xin Tu Community Health Promotion Society went through three fundamental shifts: from direct service delivery, to training community "Health Ambassadors" to serve their own neighborhoods; from labor-intensive expansion, to exploring digital platforms; and from centralized management, to a "sense-and-respond" organiz...