AccountabilityLab

QuickTabs - User profile tabs

Overview
Why do you want to join youthpower
How I want to make an Impact

Our Labs make impact communities around the world through our flagship programs, Integrity Icon, Accountability Incubator, and Citizens Helpdesks; OpenGov Hubs and Innovation Spaces; music campaigns; and coalition building, policy change, and advocacy. 

Integrity Icon has become a global movement to celebrate and encourage honest government officials. We want to move away from “naming and shaming” corrupt leaders and towards “naming and faming” those bureaucrats that are working with integrity. The goals of Integrity Icon are threefold: first to create role-models and celebrate honest public officials; second, to inspire young people by indicating that government is a career path in which one can work with integrity and honesty; and third, to connect and support the winners to help build coalitions to push for further reform and value-based decision-making over time.

Our Accountability Incubator is a year-long training and support program for young-people with great ideas for accountability. Akin to a business incubator, the Accountability Incubator provides these “accountapreneurs” with training (quarterly meet-ups and online modules), hands-on mentorship (support for the development of ideas), communications support (such as promo videos and blogs), networks (through pitch events and “friendraisers”) and resources (an innovation fund).  The Incubator builds “unlikely networks” and diverse coalitions who can find new ways to create change.

The Citizen Helpdesks (CHDs) are a pioneering citizen feedback, dialogue and community voice platform to ensure accountability in the development process. The Helpdesks collect critical information from hundreds of communities solving daily problems for citizens and closing the loop on challenges related to everything from migration, to human trafficking, to natural resource management and security issues. The CHD process is used to ensure that everyone within communities understands how and when development will take place, to build accountability into local decision-making in real-time, and to close the feedback loop between citizens, governments, the media and businesses.

The OpenGov Hubs provide the locations for our incubator and campaign activities (including trainings, events, and management) but also serve as places for collaboration, eco-system development and accountability practice building. For us, an important part of supporting a movement for accountability is bringing together a broad set of creative stakeholders- from film-makers to activists to ICT experts to government information officers- in open, creative spaces physically and intellectually.

Our music campaigns (“Rap2Rep” or “Rap to be Represented” and “Voice2Rep” or “Voice to be Represented”) engage young people through music to allow them to develop their own voice, and connect to audiences around accountability-themed songs. The goals of our music campaigns are: first to find ways to engage young people through music around issues of accountability and integrity; and second to change the approach that the industry, as a whole, takes to these challenges, through positive messaging and engagement. After the campaigns we continue to find ways to connect the artists to each other and around accountability issues they care about, such as gender diversity in the industry or copyright issues.

All of this informs our policy change and advocacy work, as we channel lessons learned upwards into policy-decision-making from the top down. This model as a whole is successful because it draws upon the creativity of communities, supports new approaches for change and builds collective efforts for reform inside and outside political systems.

Short biography
The Accountability Lab supports change-makers to develop and implement positive ideas for integrity in their communities, unleashing positive social and economic change.

Our vision is a world in which people with power are accountable. It is a world in which resources are used wisely, decisions benefit everyone fairly, and people lead secure lives. We are catalyzing a new generation of active citizens and responsible leaders around the world by supporting change-makers to develop and implement positive ideas for integrity in their communities. By enabling people to generate the knowledge, skills and networks needed for accountability, we unleash positive social and economic change.

We have three mutually-reinforcing objectives: to support a positive movement to build accountability; provide substantive, flexible and long-term support for those leaders who can collectively lead this movement within specific contexts; and support collaboration around accountability and open governance.
Networks
  • OpenGov Youth Collective
Where did you hear about us?
Email
Country
United States
Languages spoken