On the Ground

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-source platform built in Madrid, starting in 2016, then tore it down in early 2017 and rebuilt from scratch as Decidim — Catalan for "We Decide," built on Ruby on Rails. Its first pilot drew forty thousand citizens, generating roughly eleven thousand proposals of which eight thousand were accepted; in the years that followed, a large share of Barcelona's city budget went toward implementing them. In 2019, Barcelona's government formally transferred the Decidim trademark and control of the codebase to the Decidim Association, an independent citizen-run body — what the project calls "recursive democracy," where even the governance of the platform itself is decided democratically.

By 2023, Decidim's own estimate put roughly four hundred city governments, regional governments, and civil society organizations using it; another study counted 311 running instances across Spain and nineteen other countries, with the Metadecidim community at around five thousand registered members. The platform's core module has more than eighty language files covering about sixty languages — one of the rare civic-participation platforms worldwide that systematically supports multiple languages (fewer than a quarter of comparable platforms do). But results have been uneven: Zurich's Wipkingen neighborhood scaled a participatory budget from 40,000 to 540,000 Swiss francs citywide the following year, while Lucerne's LuzernNord district — deployed top-down and available only in German — actually widened the digital divide instead of narrowing it. In Badalona, near Barcelona, the entire participation process stopped after the mayor was removed by a vote of no confidence in 2018 — a reminder that what the software can do and whether an institution is actually willing to give up power are two different things. In 2023, the UN-affiliated Digital Public Goods Alliance certified Decidim as a digital public good; users now include Mexico City's open government team, Spain's Som Energia energy cooperative, and the Mozilla Foundation.

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 checks, no training standard, and no insurance. CareYaya was founded to formalize that channel into a platform. The platform itself is completely free: families pay no platform fee, students pay no agency fee, and the $17–20 an hour families pay goes almost entirely to the student. The platform runs on donations and foundation/university partnership funding, including the American Heart Association, Johns Hopkins, and AARP's AgeTech Collaborative.

By 2026, more than 50,000 students are registered on the platform (from Harvard, Stanford, Duke, Berkeley, and UT Austin), and it has facilitated more than 100,000 care connections; every student passes a background check and video interview before starting. The platform is also expanding into research and new products: a partnership with Duke uses AI to track Alzheimer's progression, a smart-glasses project (worn by seniors) screens for early cognitive decline, and the product line has grown to include an AI phone companion called QuikTok and a VR/neurotech hospice-care project featured on CBS News. Co-founder Gavry Eshet has said the model has so far only been validated within North Carolina — whether it can scale nationally or internationally (with interest already from Canada, Australia, and the UK) remains untested, and open questions remain around continuity of care as students graduate, and around liability under the "non-medical home assistance" classification.

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 toward a larger group — community health workers who walk from village to village and are often the only healthcare providers in rural areas.

Dimagi's flagship product, CommCare, is a drag-and-drop mobile data-collection and workflow platform built offline-first: workers can enter data with no signal at all, and it syncs automatically once they're back in range. It has been open source since its founding in 2002, so any organization can download, modify, and deploy it for free — which is why the national medical records system built in Zambia around 2005 was later adopted by other African countries. CommCare's impact has been tested in randomized controlled trials in India, Tanzania, and South Africa (covering child nutrition, facility-based deliveries, and cardiovascular screening), with additional studies in Nigeria and Guatemala also showing positive results.

Legally, Dimagi is a for-profit company. It became a certified B Corp in 2008 and registered as a Benefit Corporation in 2012; founder Jonathan Jackson describes its decision order as "impact, team, profit." According to the organization's own website, Dimagi's software has been deployed in more than 130 countries, has over 76 million registered users, is the designated official community health platform in nine African countries, and has more than 120 peer-reviewed papers written about it. In recent years the product line has expanded to include video-observed treatment adherence for tuberculosis (SureAdhere), a pay-for-delivered-service marketplace called Connect (launched in 2022 with a $25 million investment from the Steele Foundation for Hope, expanded to seven countries and 77,000 people by 2023), and AI-assisted tools for malnutrition prediction and chatbot support.

"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 on a résumé. Traditional hiring runs on résumés; Harambee built an assessment system that skips the résumé entirely, measuring cognitive ability, learning speed, numerical reasoning, and conscientiousness, turning an "inexperienced" young person into a set of numbers employers can read and trust.

Maryana Iskander became CEO in 2012 and scaled the goal from helping 10,000 people land a first job to an on-stage commitment at the 2015 Clinton Global Initiative to help 50,000 — a target Harambee later exceeded. As it grew, Harambee ran into another barrier: most young South Africans go online on prepaid data, and a single visit to a job site could cost a family a week's food money. So they made the SA Youth platform zero-rated across every network operator, removing "getting online" itself as a filter. The model was later validated in randomized controlled trials run with Duke University, the University of Oxford, and J-PAL, published in the American Economic Review (2022).

Today, SA Youth is no longer just an organization's project — it's national infrastructure, plugged into multiple South African government departments and connected to more than 3,000 employers. To date, over 4.6 million people have registered on the platform, 1.6 million have found income opportunities, and Harambee has helped generate a cumulative R45.2 billion (roughly $2.5 billion) in youth income. In 2024, Harvard Kennedy School turned Harambee into a case study — the school's first case built around a South African social enterprise. But the gap remains vast: in the first quarter of 2026, South Africa's official unemployment rate for ages 15 to 34 still stood at 45.8%. Current CEO Kasthuri Soni — on the founding team since 2011, and in the role since 2022 — puts it plainly: no single organization can solve a number like that alone.

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 engineering PhD Mike German, and Lehigh University professor Arup K. SenGupta took HIX-Nano — a hybrid ion-exchange nanotechnology developed in SenGupta's lab — out of the university and formally founded the company in 2013. The technology removes both arsenic and fluoride, can be regenerated and reused, costs 70% less than conventional reverse osmosis, and is far more water-efficient (RO typically wastes 40% to 60% of the water fed into it).

Drinkwell started out selling equipment, but quickly found that Bangladesh's utility companies could neither afford nor maintain standalone units. So they pivoted to an "embedded" partnership model: instead of competing with utilities, they plug into a utility's existing pipe network and take on the most technically demanding piece — removing arsenic and fluoride — delivering purified water to residents through community "water ATMs." This model has grown Drinkwell from a startup into Bangladesh's national water-security infrastructure operator: in 2026, the Asian Development Bank approved a $138 million sovereign loan to fund the expansion of its water-ATM and treatment-plant network nationwide. As of 2026, Drinkwell operates more than 300 water ATMs and 700-plus treatment plants across Bangladesh, has purified over 2.5 billion liters of water, and serves roughly three million people. In 2025, a similar project in West Bengal, India won the Assocham National Water Award, suggesting the model can replicate across regions.

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 the violence and destruction were happening, using Google Maps? Programmer David Kobia, tech blogger Erik Hersman, and software engineer Juliana Rotich picked up the idea and, using the Google Maps API, PHP, and an open-source SMS tool called FrontlineSMS, built the first prototype in four days on close to zero budget. They named the tool Ushahidi — Swahili for "testimony."

The 2010 Haiti earthquake turned Ushahidi from a one-off election tool into global crisis-response infrastructure. The U.S. State Department and the UN reached out directly; volunteers translated Haitian Creole SMS reports into English and mapped nearly forty thousand reports covering more than four thousand distinct incidents, helping locate trapped people and supply gaps. Ushahidi has since been used for election monitoring in Nigeria, the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, humanitarian tracking during the Syrian civil war, and relief coordination after the 2015 Nepal earthquake. To address the problem of unverifiable crowdsourced information, the team later introduced a multi-channel verification system that cross-checks government reports, news sources, and citizen reports against each other.

Today, Ushahidi's open-source platform has been deployed in more than 160 countries, backed by funders including the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, Google.org, and USAID. In 2013 it won a MacArthur "Genius Grant." Built in a matter of days on almost no budget, this crisis tool redefined what an ordinary person could do when disaster strikes — no need to wait for a formal institution: a phone and a text message is enough to become a coordinate on the relief map.

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 chip embedded in the device and a remote lock — customers pay a few cents a day through M-Pesa to "own it one day at a time." Pay on time and it runs normally; miss a payment and it locks automatically until the next payment unlocks it.

That self-enforcing collateral mechanism became M-KOPA's core engine. Around 2016 the company pivoted from solar to smartphones, and in 2023 it extended the same model to electric motorcycles — the product kept changing, but the underlying logic stayed the same: turn a daily repayment record into a credit history. After three months of stable payments, customers unlock digital loans, health insurance, and device protection.

Today M-KOPA operates in five African countries, has served more than 7 million customers, and has released over $2 billion in cumulative credit — 2.5 million of those customers got online for the first time through an M-KOPA device. What started as a hardware retailer has become a fintech company that uses its own credit-scoring system to redefine who deserves to be lent to.

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 threshold of entry": instead of designing a perfect anti-poverty program, ask what a person needs, at minimum, to change their own life — the answer turned out to be about $20.

That entry point grew into an entire self-built system: no school, BRAC built one; no doctor, BRAC trained its own community health workers; no reliable way to move money, BRAC incubated the mobile payment platform bKash. Rather than farm problems out to others, BRAC turned every gap it found on the front lines into a new program of its own.

Today, BRAC is the largest development organization in the world, with more than 90,000 frontline staff across 11 countries. Its bKash platform is Bangladesh's first unicorn, valued at $2 billion. Bill Gates has said BRAC "achieved something very few have — large-scale health intervention among the poorest populations on earth."

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 area.

Its approach, "developmental social work," replaces one-way charity with a single network of mutual aid: the person who donates rice today may be the one receiving help tomorrow. The flagship "modern Righteous Granary" starts with "One Spoonful of Rice" — child volunteers knock on neighbors' doors to collect a spoonful of rice, cooked into "hundred-family porridge" for families in need — and grows into a chain of programs: the Righteous Market, the Righteous Workshop, and the "Theater of One Audience."

By 2023, the Righteous Granary had reached 107 cities and over 2,800 communities, linked 231 partner organizations, engaged more than 5 million participants, and was featured in UN-Habitat's *Shanghai Manual (2022)*.

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 average of traditional crisis lines.

As of 2024, we've handled over 9 million conversations. 68% of texters end conversations with a safety plan. We also operate CrisisTrends.org, publishing anonymized, aggregated mental health data as a free public resource—currently the world's largest public mental health dataset used by police departments, universities, and the CDC.

At the intersection of empathy and innovation, our mission is to ensure that anyone, anywhere, feels heard in their darkest moment.

This podcast series explores how data saves lives, how algorithms can augment human compassion, and how an organization built on data navigates questions of trust, governance, and the meaning of "safety" in the digital age.