This blog post continues the series highlighting the work of the 2023 Charles F. Kettering Global Fellows for Advancing Inclusive Democracies. CFK Global Fellows is an initiative of the Democracy around the Globe focus area, with the goal of fostering an international community of partners to promote and defend inclusive democracies.

In the US and many countries around the world, democracy is backsliding. To counter this, civil society organizations (CSOs) have the potential to re-energize and strengthen democracy, engaging citizens, strengthening communities, and defending human rights. For these groups to have the greatest impact, they need to combine their individual strengths and work together. This is where 2023 Global Fellow Victoria Vanetta comes in.

Vanetta works for the Argentine Network for International Cooperation, or RACI, which is a federation of more than 250 civil society organizations. These organizations, she says, “play a key role in promoting inclusive democracies by contributing to developing, maintaining, and enhancing democratic processes. The civil society sector acts as a catalyst for positive change, advocating for human rights, social justice, and sustainable development.” With such an important role, these organizations need to be as effective as possible.

RACI maintained a database of all its members and their work that was used by its staff, often to help members connect to each other. Vanetta saw this as time-consuming for staff and, more importantly, wondered whether the tool was in the “wrong” hands. Would it not be more effective for network members to search this data themselves? Was having RACI as an intermediary preventing some collaborative work from taking place? It’s possible that members who needed information quickly wouldn’t take time to ask for it. Which begged two questions: What collaborations weren’t happening and what good wasn’t being done?

Vanetta saw that “benefits of collaborative work among organizations extend beyond efficient communication and resource sharing; it creates a space for the cross-pollination of ideas, expertise, and experiences.” Argentina, like other countries, needs CSOs to come together and consolidate efforts. One way to help make this happen would be to provide these groups access to the information in RACI’s database.

With this realization, Vanetta mapped what organizations would need and created a tool to provide the data for CSOs to successfully come together. She entered the information on RACI members into an interactive dashboard that lets them search for different organizational and mission-related information. The tool allows network members to identify organizations working on a particular issue and contact them directly. For example, a CSO that works in the field of environmental justice can use dashboard filters to search for other organizations with a similar mission. They can also search for organizations by size or by the region of the country in which they work.

The CFK Global Fellowship gave Vanetta the opportunity to create the first iteration of the dashboard. She is now looking to upgrade the platform to further increase the program’s effectiveness. She is excited to see how this will unlock new opportunities for cooperation and innovation for RACI network members as they continue working to strengthen civil society spaces and democracy, one collaboration at a time.