READ OUR NEW ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGY: 2026 - 2028

Lee nuestra estrategia 2026–2028 | Lee nuestro informe de impacto del 2025

Leia nossa estratégia 2026–2028 | Leia nosso relatório de impacto de 2025

Lisez notre stratégie 2026–2028 | Lisez notre rapport d’impact 2025

At The Engine Room we are building resilience for a justice-oriented-centered-forward world with care, energy, healthy transformation and communities at the center. 

We engage with practitioners, communities, humanitarian organizations, and philanthropic institutions to undertake and advance community-centered research, responsible data governance, security and decision-making, and reimagining healthy digital ecosystems.

The Engine Room (TER) has arrived at 15 years as an organization that operates and partners in solidarity and with care around many facets of tech. It’s clear that we have transitioned greatly as an organization while still being grounded in the roots of our work, thinking, and leadership. 

It is important that we continue to think about and take care in how we connect with partners as a US-based global non-profit; but we are no longer led predominantly by Global Minority leaders or grounded primarily in lived experiences from the Global Minority. We more closely mirror and connect with our partners in the Global Majority. Our voices and what we have to say are different.

What we are doing and how we see ourselves has evolved since the last time we reflected on our body of work and our approach to partnerships. Our 2026-28 strategy builds on who we are but casts forward with what we have learned and where we want to put our energies next. Some questions we considered in creating this new strategy included:

• What do our core tenets of resilience and responsibility look like across all of our work?
• How can we frame and communicate this to partners and peers?
• What new work, upgrading, and reframing is needed to strengthen our connections?
• What connects who we were before, who we are now and who we want to be?

Resilience and care as fundamental to creating possibilities

Resilience continues to be at our core. Resilience of tech and of communities – and how they shape tech and use tech – matters to us. Our approach is responsive to changing threats and builds strategies to advance social justice. This is a critical step for mitigating harms, re-imagination and creating possibilities – including our own. This includes seeing knowledge and knowledge creation as part of resilience. 

Our thinking around the concept of responsibility has evolved. Responsibility carries different meanings, depending on who holds it. Responsible data (and now AI) is an entry point to conversations, but we have to be careful about whether responsibility is something that is being assigned to others or assumed with agency. We are pivoting from responsibility to collective care. 

The arc of engagement, partnership and support

The work that we do with organizations takes place on an arc. Partners and collaborators can plug in depending on where their “now” is but we know that where an organization is at any given moment in time can change as they or their context changes. Their place on the arc may be fundamental security needs or they might be leaning into more sustainable and healthy tech or creating new futures. Journeys aren’t always linear and don’t have to be approached from start to finish. It’s important that we connect with partners over time at multiple places on the arc. 

As a Global Majority centered organization, we imagine, define and technically contribute to digital futures that are meaningful to us in collaboration with local communities. When we work with organizations that are under-resourced or under threat, we assess how we can help them right now and, at the same time, how we can help clear the table for thinking about possibilities for the digital world. We also contribute to the reimagination and building of better digital systems by coordinating, facilitating, or leading collective efforts for long-term change. 

It’s important to us to be able to say clearly and transparently what we have achieved and what makes us wildly proud. In our work we now have external and internal targets (as well as learning questions) for all of our projects. The space and resources we hold put us in a privileged position. With that comes the responsibility to ensure that our efforts are relevant, important and have a positive impact. The pandemic put us in a small space. Authoritarianism, surveillance, and corrupt power structures want us to be small. It is a political act to be expansive. Our targets are expansive and bold – and we will need to stretch to meet them. We embrace that.

• Target 1 – Partner support:  We will have achieved the external targets we collaboratively set with our partners in at least 10 intensive and 20 lighter project partnerships.
• Target 2 – Advance tech in civil society: We have a new body of work that reflects our strategy and approaches, is meaningful to us in size and scope, and has demonstrated channels with measurable use.
• Target 3 – Financial resilience:  We will raise an additional $653k to cover our FY2026 operating budget and have raised $667k (in addition to current commitments) so that we have $1.45M in committed funds for FY2027.
• Target 4 – Learning and growth: We will have achieved 90% of the internal targets we set for our projects. 

Since our founding, we have collaborated with over 900 groups of human rights defenders, climate advocates and social justice organizers across the Majority World who are using data and technology to advance change. TER engages in equitable collaboration with our community partners and places their knowledge, experiences and goals and contexts at the center. The way we go about our work has been clarified and codified in our current commitments and approaches. These run through the entire organization and are no longer siloed by workstreams. 

Our approach is designed to:

• Uplift and prioritize the self-defined needs and expertise of the communities and organizations with whom we work 
• Actively examine and counter harmful practices and embedded power imbalances to build equitable partnerships
• Use technologies, support, engagement and research methods that are resilient, embrace diverse ways of knowing and ensure the well-being of our partners and their communities

TER values are not abstract; they are concrete commitments we make with each other, our partners and the spaces we share with others. We actively practice them daily through intentional behaviors that shape how we show up for one another. We are mindful of these values in how we communicate with each other and how we speak with the world. 

Our organizational values, commitments and practices

• Centering community: We center the knowledge, leadership and priorities of our partners, and use non-extractive practices that allow us to integrate and learn from multiple ways of knowing and making sense of the world. 
  • Focusing on community needs, questions, curiosities and impact
  • Nurturing equitable partnerships
  • Seeking and cultivating local alternatives
• Building energy and propositionality: We center joy, curiosity and agency when designing engagements and developing partnerships. We amplify knowledge and perspectives that seed change and sustain communities and the planet.
  • Uplifting stories of agency and possibility
  • Building connections between communities
  • Making tech accessible through play, joy and experimentation
• Care: We safeguard people and data with care and responsibility, using and promoting responsible data practices that respect data sovereignty of our partners. Our relationships with our partners are rooted in trust, mutual care, wellbeing, and learning.
  • Contextually and culturally relevant tools
  • Implementing non-extractive knowledge sharing methods 
  • Ensuring safe and meaningful access  
  • Developing responsible data protocols
• Resilience, health and transformation: We use tools and methods that are adaptive, flexible and responsive to different contexts, strengths and constraints. We share our process and outputs in accessible ways that people can use and engage with over time.
  • Rewiring structures for health and resilience 
• Sharing knowledge for justice and transformation 

Read our annual impact reports and retrospectives

Each year, The Engine Room publishes an annual retrospective, highlighting the work of our partners, our team and the field. Explore past years below.

2023 |  2022 |  2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016

Graphics: From illustrations and graphic elements created by La Propia Agencia