Over the past 20 years, Fundación Cibervoluntarios has been engaged in fostering Digital Transformation through technological volunteering. We strongly believe in the power of collective intelligence and volunteer action when it comes to enhancing more participatory and inclusive societies. To achieve this, Cibervoluntarios created the Empodera.org (https://empodera.org/empodera/en) platform four years ago, as a step forward within the scope of collaboration and citizen engagement to create meaningful, social impact. This platform, supported by the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), is designed to boost the interaction and exchange of ideas between citizens to ultimately provide sustainable and feasible solutions to specific SDG’s, at local level. The main goal is to not only involve civil society organizations in the achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, but also public institutions and grassroots organizations.

The  online platform can be used based on individual initiatives generated by citizens, but also within specific organizations such as NGOs, municipalities, start-ups, public institutions and universities. Empodera.org offers the possibility of building the 2030 Agenda within the reach of citizens in a simple, sustainable and replicable way: Involving local communities directly in initiatives and concrete actions related to specific SDGs. The methodology and tools proposed by Empodera.org guarantees the acquisition and certification of digital skills for entrepreneurship and innovation for all the people involved, thus forming a civil society much more interested in building, co-creating and acting on specific needs related to the SGDs within their environment: real, scalable and replicable solutions from the local to the global level. All processes can be implemented both onsite with the participants and online, acting as a social network to provide a longer-term solution to the proposed initiatives.

Empodera.org counts on a network of universities and educational centers in Spain, enhancing the participation of youth in the whole process. One of Empodera.org's main strengths is the facilitation of collaborative work between platform users. To facilitate this interaction as well as to ensure an innovative process and impact, considerable co-creation has taken place in order to reach today’s results: Currently, 2,366 participants are registered, 347 initiatives have been uploaded, 198 have developed their action plan and 63 have generated impact.

How to participate in Empodera.org 

There are two ways of participating in the platform. 1.  An initiative can be created, or, 2. An initiative can be joined. In the first case, the person or entity must take leadership in the social innovation process and ensure its development until reaching the defined impact. In the second case, the person volunteering to provide support and an effective solution to the joined initiative must actively collaborate in its implementation. This happens in five stages:

1. Definition of the initiative by a person or an entity

This is the basis for the whole process. Therefore, the platform proposes a structured way to think about the basic element to be defined through completing specific fields: Title, brief description through an elevator pitch, the kind of proposed initiative.

This is also the moment in which the SDGs that will be tackled by this initiative are defined. Before sharing it to the Empodera.org community and the participants or entities’ social networks, the type of skills needed and the impact expected by this initiative can also be indicated.

2. Definition and refinement of the initiative

This step is crucial within the process since it allows the person or entity that has proposed an initiative to share it with the people that have joined it and to understand the different skills of the participants. This provides a first global picture of the collective intelligence to be enhanced within this activity.

3. Definition of the solution

At this stage, based on the support provided by the social entity and the skills of the participants, the solution’s information given by the social entity so far is reviewed and refined with the participants in order to align it to the specificities of the group’s participants specificities.

4. Definition of an action plan

Once the solution is defined, an action plan is established, which defines the tasks, its leader and divides responsibilities among participants. Tasks can include technical development, but also communicating achievements to the rest of the community. This step is important, as allowing community members to provide inputs can result in increased motivation of the participants and contributes to collective intelligence.

5. Impact measurement

As described above, the main objective of this platform is to generate impact through collective intelligence towards SDG achievement. In this sense, certain measurable elements are defined from the beginning, to measure the impact of our actions and the effectiveness and scalability (in case it is relevant) of the solutions.

Success stories created by citizens in Empodera.org 

Among the almost 350 initiatives created on the platform, we can highlight some that were created by young volunteers. The initiative ”Second Life To Masks”, for example, was proposed by Paula Hernández, biology student from Madrid, to create an online community of people united by a common goal: to minimize the climate impact of the COVID-19 health crisis by uploading recycling and artistic tips for not throwing away masks, addressing SDGs 13, 14 and 15. Actions taken included awareness-raising and the development of a website and online shop, where the recycled products were sold and thereby supported the recycling artisans network.

Another nice example of an individual initiative is “Maths for little programmers”, created by Jorge Pellejero, a volunteer who designed a mathematical training for young developers and kids who want to learn basic coding in an easy way. Through this initiative, he aimed to tackle SDG 4 “Quality Education”. When he defined his initiative, he concretized his support needs, which included a learning space and help with promotion. Two more participants of the empodera.org community joined his initiative. With this team, three actions were implemented: space creation, field preparation, and preparation of the mathematical proof. 9 young people have so far benefited from this initiative.

As an example of an initiative proposed by a social organization, we can reference the participation of the Coordinadora Arangonesa de Voluntarios and its initiative to promote the International Volunteer Day in 2021. The objective of this initiative was to create a social media campaign to acknowledge volunteering and its values. Through this initiative, they sought to address SDG 3 “Good health and Well-being”, SDG 10 “Reduced Inequalities” and SDG 17 “Partnerships for the Goals”. To implement this activity, the organization had identified the need for volunteers with a communications background to work on the campaign. The defined impact was to develop content for their social networks in order to reach 20,000 people in Aragón and to attract more volunteers for the different social entities that are part of their network. As a result of this initiative, new workgroups of volunteers have been created which are working very well. A particularity of this initiative is that the Empodera.org platform was used in the beginning of the process, which triggered volunteer participation, and ultimately led to a life outside of the platform.

From our experience, generating impact from collective intelligence involving people on a volunteer basis is the way to reach global change. What has been learned through the years is that in order to be successful, starting locally allows the establishment of a good basis that can be scaled up and replicated in order to achieve a larger impact. This is the aim of Empodera.org, and we invite you to join this network of citizen changemakers for the Sustainable Development Goals.