EngageMedia is the Linking and Learning Facilitator for Voice in Indonesia. Voice Linking and Learning refer to the total of activities, processes and trajectories realised to boost collaboration, connectedness, sharing, listening, learning, innovation and innovation of new knowledge among grantees. It aims to produce evidence, learnings and innovative solutions to catalyse transformative change to promote diversity and inclusion. EngageMedia works in straight collaboration and coordination with Voice Indonesia as well as the Voice global coordination team. In this second Phase, EngageMedia’s mandate is strengthening social movements by fostering and mobilising networks of activists.

Such networks and field-building is especially critical given the increasing complexity of the challenges faced and the availability of new technologies that allow us to break down traditional silos between organisations and across social sectors. Facilitating the Linking and Learning community allows EngageMedia to be at the heart of this new wave of collaboration and to support experimental partnerships that reach across sector, field, issue, and constituency. It has also encouraged Engage Media to approach it’s mission with a more intersectional lens, seeing the connections between different social movements and sharing skills and knowledge to mutually strengthen each another’s work.

With a total of 34 grantees, Engage Media has been able to manage the rapid growth of the Linking and Learning network. The actions that have been done are part of an integrated approach to increasing collaboration that has been designed to be as efficient as possible. Engage Media, as the facilitator, has a bird’s-eye view of how similar efforts might interact in cost-effective and perhaps more significant ways. Engage Media creates a community of practise by encouraging and supporting grantees to share resources and support one another. This eliminates wasteful duplication of effort and increases learning. We are effectively facilitating a capacity strengthening strategy by identifying shared capability gaps across grantees and promoting the development of measures to jointly fill those gaps. 

At the end of 2019, a series of events from Communities of Practice (CoP) that were established during the 2019 National Learning Event began Linking and Learning. The overall theme was to help grantees improve the quality of their advocacy efforts, particularly in terms of strategies that allow rights holders more ownership and control over their communication.   

The building of a website, www.indonesiainklusi.id  a title picked by grantees, is one of the primary components for Linking and Learning this year. This moniker was further branded by using it for our YouTube account, Spotify podcasts, and Twitter handle. Many operations were hastened as a result of the availability of these online channels, which aided our attempts to connect existing grantees with potential grantees, as well as their rights holder group members. The establishment of the Indonesia Inklusi website, a digital platform for all grantees to exchange and discuss, has been a major adaption throughout time. The website is also an attempt to limit EngageMedia’s position as a middleman, a prod and reminder to grantees about the value of linking and learning. Unfortunately, the online forum included in the package did not have the anticipated effect, but it’s difficult to say because the COVID-19 epidemic began shortly after it was released. An event that drove many grantees to prioritise their attention on people closest to them. Additionally, any in-person meetings to further train and collaborate with grantees on the website’s back-end have been rendered impossible. At the end of September 2019, the forum was withdrawn from the website. 

The pandemic scenario became a daily subject during the months of transition. Phone, Whatsapp, email, and an internet platform were used to establish all of the connections. The early experiences with the pandemic have shown that, despite their limitations, the Indonesian Inclusive community can communicate via online engagement spaces and that they have a strong desire to expand their personal horizons. 

The use of WhatsApp to share online-based events, such as Webinars, Consolidation Meetings, and even Online Exhibitions, is a new trend that looks to have quickly become a Linking and Learning Community group culture. We saw a need for grantees to be able to identify digital security and other risks during these events, so we dedicated a learning session to it at the end of the project.