Luminate: Unconventional approaches for challenging times

1. Who is Luminate and what is the focus of your work?

Luminate is a global philanthropic organization and was established by Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, in late 2018 with the aim of empowering people and institutions to work together to build just and fair societies.

We have a long history of working on these issues; for over a decade we built a portfolio and expertise as the Governance & Citizenship Engagement initiative at Omidyar Network, another philanthropic organization established by the Omidyar family. At Luminate we continue to fund and support innovative and courageous organizations and entrepreneurs around the world and advocate for the policies and actions that will drive change.

To date we have supported over 230 organizations — including amaBhungane, Global Witness, The Correspondent, Nossas, Privacy International, and Connected Development [CODE]/Follow The Money. We have worked in 18 countries working on four interrelated impact areas: civic empowerment, data and digital rights, financial transparency, and independent media. The collective impact of these organizations is helping people participate in and shape the issues affecting their societies and make government, corporations, media, and those in positions of power more responsive and more accountable.

2. Why have you decided to spin out now?

Although the past decade has delivered significant prosperity and social progress in many countries, in recent years the pillars of a strong society — press freedom, transparency and accountability, freedom of expression, and democracy — have been under sustained attack. There are many places around the world where people simply don’t have the freedom or the necessary opportunities to play a full role in society. They find themselves blocked from shaping the issues that affect them, from exercising their rights, and from being able to hold those in power to account.

This has been exacerbated by the fact that in many cases the technologies that were touted for their potential to strengthen democracy and participation, especially social media platforms, have been deliberately manipulated and misused to disseminate disinformation.

Against this backdrop there are two main factors that have led to the launch of Luminate. First, we want to protect the progress that has been made in each of our four impact areas and continue to help hold the line against forces of authoritarianism and protect core elements of healthy democracies.

Second, if we are to increase our impact and effectiveness, we must tailor our support and processes to enable our investees to succeed, and we must be more responsive to new issues and opportunities as they arise.

3. How will you operate differently now that Luminate is an independent organization?

A lot of things will stay the same. We will continue to operate globally, we will continue to provide both nonprofit and for-profit funding, we will continue to provide core operating grants, and we will provide venture support alongside funding.

However, we will also start to do some things differently as we have outlined in our first four-year strategic plan, which was published in January.

We are focused on four common goals over the next four years.

1. Reimagine the rules of the road, proposing alternative models for the norms governing relationships between individuals and institutions
2. Equip civil society to anticipate and proactively manage what’s coming
3. Protect and advance the gains we have made in the last decade
4. Prevent further retrenchment of core elements of healthy democracies

To deliver against these goals we will evolve our work in a number of ways.

We will become more operational, dedicating more time to direct advocacy for targeted policy goals. This year we will continue to focus on the policies and actions required to tackle the creeping global digital threats to democracy building on the Digital Democracy Charter & Action Plan we launched at the Paris Peace Forum in November 2018.

We will develop new entry points for change to support our work across the four impact areas. This will include engagement with the law, through strategic litigation, and work to shift narratives through storytelling around the issues central to our work. We launched our storytelling work this year with a new partnership with the Sundance Institute that will find and fund high-quality documentary, narrative, episodic, and emerging media projects from around the world, but with an emphasis in Latin America.

Finally, we will be more vocal and assertive in our points of view, sharing our ideas and public positions where they can help to move the debate or bring to light new ideas and solutions. Our work on the need for a Bill of Data Rights to protect individuals and their data, as opposed to the focus on data ownership, is a good example of this.

4. What are the big things you will be focusing on in 2019?

2019 is going to be a critical year as we work to both expand the issues we cover and deepen our engagement with our portfolio across our four impact areas.

In practice this means that our four impact areas, and the issues we cover within each of them, will evolve as follows:

Civic Empowerment: Where democracy is in recession and civic space is under threat, we must continue our work to empower individuals and communities, especially the underserved, with the tools and capacity they need to participate in governance.

Data & Digital Rights: Where the risks posed by technology to democracy and individual rights grow and manifest in actual harm, we will continue to challenge the existing rules of the road related to the collection, use, and management of data.

Financial Transparency: As corrupt practices and illicit financial flows have become the expectation, rather than the exception, and calls to “drain the swamp” get populists elected, we must continue to fight for increased transparency and accountability in the use of public funds.

Independent Media: At a time when opposition voices are silenced, journalists jailed, and misinformation trusted, we must continue our work to defend the freedom of the press and support robust media ecosystems.

5. These are big ambitions. How are you going to deliver on them?

We recognize we’re only one organization and that to tackle the long-term systemic issues we are focused on, we must continue to seek out and collaborate with partners around the world.
We must continue to partner with other funders and investors who share our values and concern about the same issues, we must engage with policy makers who are driving change to protect and rebuild the foundation of just and fair societies, and support those organizations that are creating the solutions to many of these pressing issues.