By Conor McGlynn and Siddharth de Souza
Welcome to Adda Strategy, the Justice Adda platform for supporting and providing resources to social enterprises and non-governmental organizations ( NGOs) looking to maximise their positive impact in the world. Through blog posts, articles, interviews and sharing tools from across the web, we hope to make Adda Strategy a space for people who want to improve how they communicate, adopt new ideas for project management, develop strategies to campaign more efficiently and develop methods to evaluate and sustain their efforts for positive social change.
We envisage Adda Strategy as a practical space that provides content on topics such as how to write grant applications, how to build communication strategies, how collaborate with government, how to build a vision or a value proposition.By using our own modest experience in the communications and social enterprise sectors, along with collecting the expertise of people far more knowledgeable than ourselves, we hope to provide useful, accessible content for those who are working in the social enterprise and NGO space.
The original vision for Adda Strategy was to build a space to document stories, experiences and lessons of those who have worked and fought for human rights and social justice. The platform was intended for reflection on the triumphs and struggles of these individuals, organisations and communities by providing a space for their stories to be acknowledged, shared and studied by those aspiring to work in a similar field. However, after extensively studying other platforms and websites, and recognizing the important and valuable work already being done in this regard, we decided that to create additional value for our audience, we would instead focus on supporting these very same individuals, organisations and groups by providing them content, tools and suggestions that will fuel the everyday running of their social enterprises or NGOs.
Adda Strategy aims to be a democratic space for such discussions. It aspires to allow for new and fresh perspectives from persons young and old, experts and non-experts, risk takers and those more averse, to come on board and join the conversation. This will allow us to create a forum that offers a plurality of opinions, debates and conversations, one that will make the learning environment for everyone richer.
Martin Luther King once said that while he admired the Good Samaritan, who stopped on the way to Jericho to aid a beaten and starving man, he did not believe that is enough to bring about systemic change for justice. He did not want to spend his life helping people by the side of the road. He instead wanted to change the nature of Jericho road itself, so that no one would have to be hurt or go hungry. He thereby rallied those around him to build interventions aimed at fundamentally addressing the inequalities the plague and challenge us every day.
In a modest way, we hope to provide and learn from people invested in making a difference. We want to provide a repository of information, tools and content which can help individuals in their personal missions to transform the Jericho road, to be changemakers in the world, and to build their visions for a better future.
For this, we have launched Adda Strategy. We hope you find it useful.
(Conor is Editor of Baithak and Siddharth is Founder of Justice Adda)