The Digital Us Academy

Our most recent initiative for communities is addressing online hate speech, discrimination, and racism in the Netherlands through The Digital Us Academy. In The Digital Us Academy, young people come together to engage in dialogue, learn how to effectively stand up against online hate, and work together towards one goal: making social media safer and more inclusive for everyone.

The Digital Us Academy is more than just a training; it is a movement, a community of young people who unite to take a stand against online hate, discrimination, and racism. Together, we create real change, both online and in the world around us. We have developed a toolkit designed to help individuals effectively respond to online hate, discrimination, and racism encountered within digital spaces such as social media. The toolkit is based on our Respect against hate-framework, which trains youth in five specific actions to take when being confronted with online hate, discrimination or racism, while at the same time shows them how they can work together during these actions while maintaining emotional well-being through self-care mechanisms. 

This initiative currently is focused on Dutch youth. Alongside our focus on youth, we are also exploring partnerships with organisations and media organisations to support them in effectively countering hate on their platforms. If you are working with non-Dutch youth and are interested in bringing The Digital Us Academy to your community, contact us, as we are happy to translate the toolkit to different languages and bring the academy to your community. 

Hire a facilitator

In all our online interactive learning experiences, we work with trained and experienced facilitators. During the past 12 years programming these learning experiences, we have been able to build a strong community of (online) dialogue facilitators. Our facilitators are experienced in facilitating interactive online dialogue sessions with very diverse groups of people. The differences of the audiences we work with are along the many aspects of personal identity (such as culture, nationality, or gender) but also differences in social economic or educational backgrounds, life experiences and social and political ideologies.

While facilitating our programmes, facilitators are observed and coached and receive feedback on their performances. We continuously offer training opportunities to further develop their skills. We enable them to respond to changing dynamics in the groups they work with as a result of global social and political challenges that affect participants in our programmes through tailored masterclasses.

Besides their experience and skill in (online) dialogue facilitation, many of the facilitators in our community have other skills sets, such as mediation, design thinking or event host and chair. Our facilitator community is spread across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East and speak various languages besides English, such as Arabic, French, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch. Thereby, we can offer facilitators that match specific skill sets you need for your event, project, or organisation.

Contact us via the button below to learn more about the opportunities when hiring a facilitator.

Tailored solutions or support

Are you, your organisation or community struggling with building relationships across difference? Do you seek support in developing processes that may foster better understanding between people, building relationships across barriers, or developing empathy between people with different backgrounds and/or life experiences? Reach out to us to see if we can support you with guidance, coaching or the design and implementation of entire engagement processes in which people constructively interact and learn with and from each other.