Sharing Ambitions and Direction for the Humanity Hub
By Jill Wilkinson, Managing Director of the Hague Humanity Hub
On the occasion of the Annual Peace and Justice Reception on February 1, I was very happy to present our ambitions and direction for the near future along with some reflections on our first 6 years and would like to share them with you here.
The Hague Humanity Hub’s mission is to contribute to a more peaceful and just world by supporting and strengthening the peace and justice community of the Hague. Since 2018, the Hub has been bringing you together to connect and share knowledge through events like the peace and justice café, to share and reflect on difficult topics in a safe environment, like at the outbreak of war in Ukraine and on the situation in Gaza and to learn from each other and experts on wide ranging topics. We have collaborated to engage with the public through programmes like Just Peace and enhanced the visibility and transparency of this community of thousands of professionals from hundreds of organisations. We have provided a homebase for this community as a clubhouse, an event space and as an office, connected employers with hundreds of talented candidates and welcomed and supported dozens of new organizations setting up in the Hague.
Over these six years, we developed an appreciation of the unique confluence of expertise and energy in The Hague and we have been listening and learning how and where we can best support the community. We have heard from many of you a desire to increase our collective impact. Building on this, I would like to share with you our ambitions and plans going forward.
First our ambitions; one, to make it easier for you, the community, to engage with each other on specific topics; and two, to increase our collective impact.
To make it easier for you to engage, we have structured our programmes around 5 strengthening areas:
Connection and Knowledge Sharing
We will continue to support connection and knowledge sharing on relevant topics in co-creation with the community and expert partners.
Public Engagement
We will further develop our public engagement programmes, following on the success of the Just Peace platform and as a partner in Spreeek.
Talent
We will further develop the Talent Hub, supporting the connection between employers and talent, with e.g. the Talent 4 Good fair, the hub job board and the Handshake series and talent development, e.g. as a partner in a project with The Hague University of Applied Sciences.
Access to Funding
We look forward to announcing a new Access to Funding Programme in March that we are developing with an expert partner. The goal is to help improve individual and collective fundraising ability and connect organisations to funders.
Digitalization
Rapidly evolving digital technologies present opportunities and threats to our work. This year we will be running 2 Cyber resilience programmes together with the CyberPeace Institute and other partners with support from the Municipality of The Hague and the Netherlands Enterprise Agency.
Increasing Collective Impact
Our further ambition is to increase collective impact. The unique collection of people and expertise in the Hague presents an opportunity to reach beyond the status quo.
We will focus on specific areas, build communities to increase impact, highlight, support and strengthen existing initiatives, and cocreate new initiatives where needed. From climate justice to security and rule of law, the Hague is known for its expertise, but also for its progressive spirit and ambition to challenge and innovate. We offer our support and believe that together we can make even more of a difference.
We hope you share this ambition to increase impact with us and invite you to share your ideas, suggestions and calls for collaborative action and cannot wait to see how much we can achieve together.
