About Build Up | Build Up

Build Up uses new tools for old problems, and old tools for new problems. We implement programs, conduct research, and develop technical solutions to engage with conflict and build societies in which everyone can thrive. We are a digital-first organization, which means we both use digital technologies throughout our peacebuilding work and deeply understand the impact of technology on conflict.

We leverage digital technologies, designing and adapting new tools to implement interventions that transform conflict with more connection, collaboration, and inclusion. We support peace innovators across the globe, working with local organizations to design and implement technology interventions for peacebuilding processes that address divisions in society.

We also apply traditional technologies, cultural knowledge, and evidence-based peacebuilding practices like art, dialogue, organizing, and participatory methodologies to address emergent, often technology-driven, challenges to peace. We transform conflicts that happen in digital spaces, conducting research and interventions to address polarization on social and digital media in diverse contexts across the globe.

Want to know more about our work?

Watch a five minute video about who we are and what we do
See more about our work in program areas: peace innovators, digital conflict, and participatory processes.
Join the conversation: To support our own and others’ work, we develop policy and research, deliver online and in-person training courses, and host a global community of practice around peace, technology and arts, convened at the annual Build Peace conference.
Check out our comprehensive annual reports: 2023 (Latest), 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019.

Now hiring: Peer Support Leads for The Commons Project — click here to see the Terms of reference! Deadline August 1.

Now hiring: Technical Innovator for Peace — click here to see the Terms of reference!
Deadline August 3.

Our Values

Build Up is a new model for a global non-profit, driven by values embodied throughout our work, culture, and organizational structure: Build Up operates as a collective, in which we share organisational and financial ownership, operation, and risk across our core team. Shared ownership includes collective shaping of our organisational strategy, systems, and distributed organisational maintenance duties. As a financial collective, we transparently set salaries according to need, rather than hierarchy, age, experience, or geography. We share our internal operating structure and policies here.

Our internal operating principles reflect the values we bring to our work: We believe in a collective, decolonial, and anti-racist peacebuilding practice. We believe in non-extractive and relationship-centered processes. We are honest, open, and vulnerable. We are not experts. We value knowledge, and we engage in cross- and trans-disciplinary thinking and doing. We give space to learn, encouragement to grow, and sometimes to err. We work with and support ourselves and others as whole people. We place stewardship, respect, love, peace and non-violence at the heart of our work. And our style is a bit punk: non-hierarchical, dynamic, and a little irreverent.

Our Core Team

Build Up is a non-profit with a global team. Our core team brings together diverse skills: mediation, negotiation, facilitation, peacebuilding, marketing, media, filmmaking, design, coding, data analysis, social media, research, graphic recording and more.