What a year. As we stepped into year two of the global pandemic, we slowed down internally, and acknowledged that providing meaningful and useful support to partners means recognising their realities and their context, and following their pace, needs and the often unexpected ebbs and flows of the pandemic. For us at The Engine Room, the year hit hard on a personal level, as our Executive Director, Julia, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Our priorities, therefore, included giving her the time and space she needs to heal, and our team stepped up in so many ways to make that possible.

This year, the extended nature of the pandemic was felt on many levels — from thinking holistically about what operating in a remote-first model might look like in the long-term for many of our partners, to focusing on strengthening digital infrastructure instead of on short-term fixes. Internally, it meant strengthening documentation practices and building internal processes to allow for people to step away when they needed to.

Programmatically, this meant updating our work in a few key areas. We redesigned our Matchbox intensive support programme in a way that builds upon the light touch support that we provide to dozens of groups a year & — streamlining the intake process to ensure that we're providing intensive support to those who both need it and have the capacity to partner with us on it. Our research projects reflected an increase in interest about the intersection of digital rights and various social justice movements and issues, like environmental justice.

In the spirit of slowing down — and to acknowledge that though much about the world has changed in the last two years, a lot of the inequities that fuelled our strategy refresh early last year remain more entrenched than ever — we made the decision to extend our latest strategy through the end of 2023. This allows us to double down on our focus on strengthening digital resilience within civil society, critically assessing the way that power moves within and through our technology and data practices, and using the tools we have to push for accountability.

This was also a year, I hope, of growth on many levels — of cultivation, collaboration and making space for ourselves and each other. We've learned (and are still learning) how to be gentle with each other, to give space to acknowledge the grief many of us have felt this year, and to use everything that has happened to start 2022 determined to continue pushing for more equitable and just distributions of power.

I'm so proud of everything we've achieved despite the hardships we and our communities have faced — not just the easy-to-describe, measurable programmatic work that you'll read about in this retrospective, but the less visible internal work too, identifying practices that will make ours an even more supportive workplace, listening to our needs, and figuring out ways of showing up for each other. I'm grateful for all the support we've received, and am looking forward to working with many of you in 2022.

— Sincerely, Zara Rahman