Cité de la Solidarité Internationale (CSI) invited Humanitarian Designers (HD) to facilitate a workshop at Soliway festival. We first collaborated with CSI around France Design Week 2021, and we continued to follow each other's work over the years. When we organised the HD Meetup Lab 2024 at CERN IdeaSquare, CSI joined as a participant, which deepened the trust between our organisations. The fact that they then invited us to facilitate for their humanitarian audience showed they believed we were relevant to them, and that was a meaningful milestone for us.
The timing of this invitation mattered: the humanitarian sector is in financial crisis, organisations are laying off staff, and students are entering a field that feels unstable. We wanted to be thoughtful about what we could offer in this moment. Communities of practice create spaces where practitioners can work together more effectively with fewer resources, learn across boundaries, make space for local voices and local leaders, and redistribute decision-making power. During the two-day Soliway event, aid workers kept saying the same thing: they needed connection, to learn together, to feel heard. Our role as designers was to make that possible. We structured the space so people could think and learn together, to map the challenges they faced and understand the opportunities that communities of practice could bring.
We are a non-profit organisation registered in France as an Association Loi 1901 since January 2021. Our mission is to build bridges between the humanitarian and design sectors. Currently, we have an online community of over 900 people, and we are committed to expanding our knowledge and sharing it with an even broader audience.
The Cité de la Solidarité Internationale is a service hub supporting individuals and organisations working on the topic of international solidarity in the Greater Geneva region and beyond. Its programmes aim to foster exchanges and initiatives within this sector hence the creation of the Soliway event.
For this event, Cédric and Mathild organised and facilitated the workshop on communities of practice. Gwenn, as core team member, and Stefano, who is part of the first cohort of volunteers and living in Geneva, supported the organisation and the communication of this event.
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The workshop lasted an hour and a half, and included 15 participants with the facilitators.