Supporting community organizations and talented individuals against disinformation
In 2022, our team launched the Community Engagement Fund to complement our 2022 election research. Putting our money where our mouth is, we made available seed funding for non-traditional actors to work with them in designing new interventions.
Having received more than a dozen applications, we awarded small grants to interventions pertaining to: a digital storybook for children designed to teach them about safety and harms of the digital world, modules for high school students and teachers on critical disinformation studies, disinformation and prebunking training for teachers, and creative storytelling to children in orphanages.
Our partners include secondary and tertiary-level educators, as well as pro-democracy and human rights organizations.
Check out our partners’ community-driven innovations below!
Have you ever wondered what the most watched YouTube video is?You’ll probably think it’s a song by the most popular artist, a very trendy dance video, or simply a wacky home video turned viral that has been cycling for years. But perhaps it has slipped your mind that in 2016…
What if every classroom became a stronghold of critical thinking and fact-checking? Could empowering educators with anti-disinformation strategies pave the way for a more informed society? These questions are what prompted the creation of Pinas Forward’s Guro ng Makabagong Mundo: Responding to the Modern World of Technology & Disinformation program.
Makiramdam, founded after the 2022 Philippine elections, uses storytelling to engage young Filipinos with history, especially the Martial Law era, aiming to combat misinformation. With support from the Community Engagement Fund, they’ve hosted 14 events, involving 350 young people, transforming history lessons into immersive experiences that inspire critical thinking and
Building on this momentum, our organization proposes a space-building initiative for the anti-disinformation space that aims to translate sociological insights into specific interventions to complement local campaigns and advocacy for the 2025 elections. In time for the 2025 elections, the second iteration of the Community Engagement Fund aims to empower non-traditional actors to participate in addressing influence operations and its social costs to improve the Filipino public sphere.
An open call for applications will be released to encourage individuals and groups from diverse sectors of library science, education, social work, and the creative industries, among others to codesign creative and nontraditional interventions on key pillars of: (1) accountability of top-level disinformers, (2) citizen empowerment emphasizing community dialogue and depolarization, and (3) counter-narrative design.