Foundry Conversations Podcast Episode 2: Platforms for Activism with Irene Milleiro
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EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Irene was until December 2021 the Managing Director for Latin America, Asia and Africa at Change.org. Change.org is the largest petition platform in the world, aimed at empowering people to create the change they want to see. Irene has over 15 years of experience in social campaigns and citizen engagement, and is passionate about the intersection between technology and social change. From 2011 to 2019 she helped launch petition platform Change.org in Spain and then grow it in Europe. From 2004 to 2011 she played different roles at Oxfam Spain’s campaigns and policy department.
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What is Foundry Conversations?
Foundry Conversations is an initiative created by members of The Foundry at Acumen Academy. We chat with leaders like you who are tackling the world’s toughest challenges. Together, we explore the most critical issues in their communities, how they navigate this complex moment in time, and what moral leadership means to them. You’ll get an inspiring glimpse of their vision for a better world, and practical ideas for creating the change that matters most to you.
Transcript: English
GUEST: Irene Milleiro Diaz
HOST: Neel Tamhane
Podcast Introduction (Neel, Daisy, Daniela)
Welcome to Foundry Conversations. This podcast is brought to you by a global community of builders and innovators committed to a meaningful, positive impact. We chat with leaders around the globe like you, who are tackling the world’s toughest challenges. In this space, you’ll hear guests share about the most critical issues in their communities, how they navigate this complex moment in time, and what moral leadership means to them.
Irene: Catalina is a beautiful Argentinian little girl, and since she was a baby, she has been dependent on a breathing machine to survive. The problem in Argentina is that there are regular power cuts, and those power cuts were a death threat for her. So her mother, Mariella, was terrified.
She decided to start a petition on change.org, asking the Argentinian electricity company to provide a generator set to ensure that the power cuts would not risk her baby’s life. She got over 28,000 signatures in her petition and she got a positive response from the electricity company. But during this time she actually met other people, other families in the same situation, so she didn’t stop there. She actually started a second petition asking the Argentinian government for a law to protect “electro-dependent” people by ensuring all of them will have access to a free generator and a reduced electricity tariff.
In this competition, she gathered over 870,000 signatures, and one year later, the Argentinian Parliament approved the law ensuring those life saving measures for electro dependent patients.
I think this story of Katharine and Mariella is a beautiful example of how any person can use our platform to find support for their cause and engage with institutions to create powerful change for millions of people.
Neel: I’m Neel and this is the Foundry Conversations Podcast. Today’s guest Irene is the managing director for Latin America, Asia and Africa at change.org.
change.org is the largest petition platform in the world aimed at empowering people to create the change they want to see. Irene has over 15 years of experience in social campaigns and citizen engagement and is passionate about the intersection between technology and social change. From 2011 to 2019, she helped launch the petition platform change.org in Spain and then grow it in Europe. From 2004 to 2011, she played different roles in Oxfam and Spain’s campaigns in their policy department.
She is also a part of the Founder community and an Acumen Spain Fellow in 2021.
Neel: Welcome, Irene. Lovely to have you here.
Irene: Good to you talk to you, Neel
Neel: Right off the bat. I think this entire story is so powerful and is something that is very inspiring. I think it made me also think and put the entire work that you do with change.org in context in one go. But I’d love to also hear more about the space that you work in, what is the biggest problem that you’re tackling and what are the innovations that you see and you work with on an everyday basis.
Irene: So sometimes it’s a bit difficult to define the space that change.org works in. I think it’s a bit of social change space, activism space. But basically what we’re trying to do is work on the social change space to try to better use technology to achieve impact. And I think this is still a big challenge for the social change space. I am a passionate believer in the power of technology. I think technology offers countless opportunities for reinventing the way we campaign and the way that activism is done.
And we are just at the beginning of a journey. Unfortunately, what I see is that some social change groups and some of the NGOs that are involved in campaigning are still quite behind in terms of using digital tools for creating change. And they mostly resort to very classical tools like manifestos and demonstrations, which are good. But I think we can go beyond that to try to create impact. My experience is that technology has greatly reduced the barriers for collaboration and participation, and I think organizations should be using that much more.
And this can take different forms. It can be about how you leverage social media better to engage people and their creativity. How do you put campaigning or you use the skills of people around the world to help you craft and help you deliver those campaigns?
My intuition, I might completely be wrong, but is that the future of social change is going to be on small citizen led digital groups that are going to be self organized through digital tools, hyper focused on creating change in a very specific area, a very specific problem that they want to address.
I can put a very recent example that, for me, was a bit of a light about what the future might be. I’m normally a part of different women groups. In Spain, we use WhatsApp a lot. So I have different women groups in WhatsApp. Sometimes women in tech, women and democracy and other groups. And some months ago, when the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, some of us in those groups were very concerned about the situation of Afghan women, and we quickly self organized in a separate WhatsApp group.
We started leveraging our contacts and our networks to try to first help some women leave the country and later, once they came to Spain, to support them both economically and emotionally in this journey, as they start a new life in a different country. You know, it was a way of people self organizing, no intermediaries, no NGOs, just with our time, our money and our skills and our network. And I thought it was a beautiful example of what I think the future might be.
“… the future of social change is going to be on small citizen led digital groups that are going to be self organized through digital tools, hyper focused on creating change in a very specific area, a very specific problem that they want to address.”
Neel: It’s such an inspiration to hear this. I think the whole story of how the power of community and a platform like this, especially using technology that’s accessible to so many people around the world, can be so powerful, is really inspiring. Talking about inspiration. What is your WHY? Who inspires you to get up every day and do this work?
Irene: I would say, people. I deeply believe that most people inherently want to do good for the world. It’s just that sometimes they don’t know how to. So my why has always been about being next to people and trying to help people realize about the power they have to create change, help people understand that they don’t have to be quiet if they suffer an injustice or they witness an injustice and they’re actually working together, and collective action can really transform the world in a better place. I really believe we can all be change makers, everybody at their own pace and at their own level.
But if we are provided the tools and the motivation to create change, I think people will do that, and that’s what I try to do. I try to provide those tools and motivation, and I’m inspired every day by the people I work with have change.org and the people I work with in the wider social change ecosystem. But most of all, I’m always really inspired by our amazing petition starters. To see these people, their generosity, their determination, their strength, trying to create change not only for them, but normally for millions of people like them that might be affected by the change they are trying to create. It’s really a source of inspiration for me.
Neel: You’re so lucky to have so many inspiring people around you and as a leader, creating that inspiration not just from hearing all these different stories, but creating a platform that inspires other people to contribute and come forward and to volunteer to support such initiatives is something that’s very inspiring. But being a leader in this space doesn’t come without any challenges. So what is that one challenge that you are currently facing as a leader? And how are you navigating and wrestling with that?
Irene: So, ummm, uff! There are many challenges, but I think one of the challenges that I would talk about probably is one of the things we are working on a lot. We’ve been working a lot in the past year, and I’ve been really trying to move forward. It is about how do we make our organization truly diverse and inclusive? I think this is a key journey for organizations to go through, but at the same time, it’s something that is difficult and painful, and I think I would say it’s even more painful in social change organizations. Because it feels like a little bit “we are trying to do good”, so it’s like sometimes for people unconceivable, that we might be putting barriers for people with different backgrounds or so. We’ve been on a journey that requires a lot of self reflection, being really humble as a leader and being ready to accept things in you that you might not be proud of. So in the past year, I’ve done a lot of personal reflections, as well as company reflections about my own privilege and my own biases and how those have reflected in my actions in the past. We also opened this reflection internally at all levels of the organization, but we can’t stop there.
We can’t stop in the reflection and in the talking. I think we need to commit resources to make the organization places where every person doesn’t matter their age, the background, they come from, their sexual orientation, their gender, their level of ability, in a place where everybody can be themselves and they feel psychologically safe. And it sounds easy. But I think it’s not so easy. We are still in the testing phase. We are trying to put measures in place to start improving, understanding and appreciating difference. Becoming more inclusive as an organization. Hiring and retaining more diverse talent like people with disabilities or trans people that we have very few in the organization. We’re trying to support different employee groups, providing particular training and leadership support for groups that are underrepresented at leadership levels. So I think it’s a work that will take leadership to be really intentional and patient and determined because it’s going to take a long time to correct the systemic inequality and privilege. So it’s a journey that never finishes. But I’m actually really happy that we started this. And I think it’s a moment for us to correct something that we’re not right in the past.
Neel: It is a daunting challenge, and it is a worldwide challenge that we are all dealing with around the world. But it takes a lot of humility as a leader to even step up and be self aware to notice the challenge and also actively pursue in trying to tackle that. So kudos to that. But talking about that, I think challenges also sometimes seem as speed bumps on the road, and sometimes you also hit failure while trying out different things. But the Acumen community, as you already know, we don’t look at failure as blockers, but we look at it as an opportunity to learn something new.
So I’d love to hear one story of failure that you have encountered in the past and what you’ve learned from it.
Irene: Yeah, I think we also cherish failure in a way in change.org. We have had festivals of failure internally, where everybody will be talking about their failures. I have many things, but I’m going to go back to probably the first big failure I had in my life. So when I went to University many years ago, when I got into University, one of the things I noticed is that in the University canteen a lot of food was being wasted and was being thrown out. I would see people with trays full of rests of food throwing it out.
And I was like, oh, Lord, at the time, it was a time where actually there were a lot of famines in Sudan and other places. And I thought, how can we be wasting food and the resources of the planet in such a way? So I thought, I’m going to do something about it. So I talked to the people managing the University canteen. And I created a bit of, like, placards and posters and a bit of my first campaign. Put things outside the canteen, so when people would come in they would see some messages and some pictures to make people reflect about food waste and how they could themselves take it on.
So I put that campaign out there and it worked. Two or three weeks later, I talked to the people in the container and they said, no, people are much more aware and they’re taking less food and they’re throwing away less food. This is really working. So I felt really pleased. I thought, you know, I made a difference. Now people are more conscious. So I took the campaign down. I took the posters down, I took everything down. And one week later, everything was exactly the same as before the campaign.
So that was a big learning for me around how to create changes that are sustainable in time. And this is something I think you actually need to consider from the very first moment that you’re trying to create a change. It’s just not about how I am going to create the change, but how this change can be sustained over the years. So that’s something that is ingrained in my mind now and every time I think about something, it’s like, how can we change also, the system that supports this change to make it sustainable in the future.
Neel: That is such a fantastic insight. I think change is sometimes and also, I think with the whole idea of activism, a lot of new movements start with a lot of rigor and a lot of passion and a lot of excitement. A lot of people join the commitment very quickly, but sustaining the change and also making sure you are true to the cause from where it started, all from is something that’s something that’s very hard to do. And I couldn’t relate more to this. But jumping on to the next section, I think we’ve heard a few stories.
I’d love to also put you on the spot now, and we have a little bit of a rapid fire section where it’s going to be very simple. I’ll ask you a couple of questions. You have to try and answer these questions either in a single phrase or something that’s very direct at the most a sentence. Okay, so here comes the first one. So, what’s one value that you care about most?
Irene: Empathy.
Neel: What have you found consistently the most inspiring?
Irene: Determined people
Neel: For these last questions we’re going to each complete the sentences.
It’s like a fill in the blanks kind of manner.
Communities are amazing because __________
Irene: They have a joint purpose to work towards
Neel: One cartoon character that you love the most _____
Irene: And actually, Mafalda is an Argentinian cartoon that I love about this amazing girl. Mafalda, I would say,
Neel: Okay, that’s lovely.
I love your answers.
Someone who inspires you _____
Irene: My petition starters
Neel: Success is ________
Irene: Feeling happy and at peace with oneself.
Neel: I’m most proud of _______
Irene: Having been true to what I wanted to do and to the mission. I think I have been consistent all my life.
Neel: That’s certainly something that you should be very proud of. I’m so glad to have had this conversation with you. Thank you for taking the time for this. All the stories that you’re capturing and all the movements that you’re inspiring and supporting around the world are truly inspirational, and I hope Change.Org supports a lot of very critical movements that are going to take place in the next few decades. And thanks a lot for joining us at foundry conversations. This is going to be an exciting conversation, and we’d love to talk to you again.
In some time, when things have evolved, things have changed and it would be lovely to regroup and talk to you when you have the time for it completely.
Irene
Thank you for giving me this space, Neel. It’s been really great and I hope we can talk again soon.
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The music for Foundry Conversations was composed by Amadeus Foundation and recorded by Amadeus String Youth Orchestra in Bello, Colombia. Amadeus cultivates the emotional intelligence of children and young people at high social risk through music addressing their need for social inclusiveness.
Do you want to listen more Foundry Conversations? Click on the following links to meet more Foundry members and their work to build they are doing to build a more just, inclusive and sustainable world:
- Episode 1: Meet The Hosts.
- Episode 3: Mental Health Care in India with Rashi Vidyasagar.
- Episode 4: Stories of Sexual, Reproductive and Health Rights in Bangladesh with Syeda Samara Mortada.
- Episode 5: Launching African Creatives with Chidi Nwaogu.
- Episode 6: A Social Media Platform for Voices Unheard with Vijay Sai Pratap.
- Episode 7: A Transformative Youth Orchestra in Colombia with Daniela Ocampo.
About Acumen Academy:
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Learn more at www.acumenacademy.org and on social media @AcumenAcademy.
