Inspiratorio: a learning platform built for belonging.

A designer-as-NGO-coordinator story (2020-2025)

Role: Platform coordinator and service designer for Inspiratorio.org | Scale: 2,500 activists · 19 countries · 5 time zones

What happens when a designer is hired to coordinate an NGO platform?

In 2020, I was hired by Puentes to coordinate Inspiratorio, building the platform from scratch to house 10 online learning services (sync and async) for diverse human rights activists across 19 countries in LATAM. As a service designer I understood I had two sets of users:

  • my team (which grew in size and complexity each year)

  • and the end users (activists).

In five years, I grew Inspiratorio from a contact list of 200 people, to 2,500 active users served by an articulated team-of-teams across 5 time zones. But of all of my time at Puentes, what I'm proudest of is the felt experience I designed that made users feel safe enough to be creative and experiment, something I evolved from a method I'd developed and tested at OYE [ —> more on OYE here]. 

OUTCOMES

Grew from a Colombian pilot to 2,500 participants across 19 countries and dozens of human rights causes.

From 200 to 2,500 in 5 years

Six services, built while run

Six learning services designed and delivered in parallel over three years, on time, on scope, and on budget.

Known among users as a warmer, safer place to experiment than the activist spaces they were used to.

Belonging, by design

A scattered movement, in need of collective creativity

THE PROBLEM

When I joined Puentes in 2020, activists across Latin America were stalling. Old strategies had stopped working, and the constant indignation of online activist culture was freezing the creativity new ones require. They were also scattered: isolated across causes, countries, and identities, with little common ground.

Puentes' founder had come to narrative work* from years in strategic litigation, seeing it as a human complement to legal and political change, and founded Puentes in 2019 to bring it to Latin American activists. But narrative change has no settled theory, and what exists is US-built and culturally non-transferable. Users would have to experiment, adapt it to their contexts, and share what they found.

So Inspiratorio had to become the thing that made that possible: a place that connected a scattered movement and sparked the creativity it had lost.

*

Narrative work is a type of culture-change work. Narratives are the shared stories we tell ourselves to explain reality. According to Puentes, sparking large-scale culture change means activists must draw on strategic storytelling, creativity, and collective work.

Coordinating as a service designer

MY MAIN ROLE

My job as coordinator was to create the scaffolding the platform needed to deliver its services, which were strategically defined by the founder. She decided which services we would run and when; my job was to organise the team to meet the dates and objectives she set. So I treated the team itself as a user group.

As a service designer, I knew a platform where each expert improvised their own delivery wouldn't scale, so I looked for patterns and standardised the workflows, helping the team prepare and deliver in ways users found consistent, and enjoyed. For example, I created a service blueprint for all webinars, mapping the full journey from awareness to retention, including where we'd check whether it was landing. To do that I ran an NPS survey, a light read on whether we were winning people over or losing them. It became the baseline for every service that followed.

This is a visualisation of the original Inspiratorio webinar blueprint. Service blueprints act as scaffolding for digital services, helping the team prepare and deliver in ways users enjoy, value and find consistent.

Thanks to the original webinar blueprint, colleagues could adapt it and Inspiratorio scaled into a service hub (ecosystem), annually running 10 sync and asynchronous services for narrative training tailored to diverse learning needs.

Holding an international, remote team together

I began as the only person designing and delivering, then grew into managing four people plus vendors, negotiating scope across Puentes' other platforms, reporting to both the founder and the Programs Director.

The team was split: leadership in Madrid, operations scattered across Latin America, some with little time-zone overlap. Based in Barcelona, I sat in the gap, generating shared context and linking the people each delivery needed, so a fragmented setup still reached users as one coherent thing. Artefacts such as blueprints and project briefs helped create context based on my colleagues needs, facilitating their work.

THE EXPERIENCE DESIGN

Designing for a sense of belonging

“Belonging happens when people feel safe, seen, and accepted” 

CHRISTINE WONG YAP (SOCIAL PRACTICE ARTIST)
THE INSIGHT

Step 1: You don't beat fatigue with more urgency. You beat it with play.

Remember our users’ emotional starting point? Fatigued from hard realities and old strategies that no longer worked. Sensing that doing things differently felt risky.

From my work at OYE I recognised this as apocalyptic fatigue, climate activist Per Espen Stoknes’ term for the freeze doom produces. We know from neuroscience that fear stifles creativity and innovation. We simply can’t think our way out of fear-based states. We need to feel safe. And once we feel safe, we can start playing and creating.

With that in mind, I borrowed from Ingrid Fetell-Lee’s Aesthetics of Joy framework to define the aesthetic concept for Inspiratorio in a way that would reliably spark safety, invoke play, and nudge users into a state of mind

“rituals that bring us together, spaces that keep us calm, roles that create a sense of responsibility, systems that make us feel respected, communications that create understanding”

Then Puentes taught me belonging and hope

OYE taught me how to design for creative permission, but its users shared a common ideological ground (feminism) that made building bridges easier. Inspiratorio didn't have that common ground. With users across countries, cultures, human rights causes, and identities, and no settled definition of narrative work, a communal identity had to be designed:

  • I designed for belonging, in the Othering & Belonging Institute's sense: a space people enter as themselves.

  • I enabled belonging by modelling the behaviour of Inspiratorio hosts on Kasper Ter Kuile’s ideas of sacred hospitality (shared vulnerability builds trust).

  • I used Fetell-Lee’s Aesthetics of Joy to evoke hope, in the sense of Thomas Coombes’ Hope-based comms: a belief in the goodness of humanity and our ability to change.

So, what happens when a designer is hired to coordinate, not just design?

LESSONS LEARNED

Four things came out of this role that I'd bring to the next:

  • I treat the team as users. I design the internal tools, context docs, meetings, workflows, as products with people who use them, so coordination makes the work easier instead of adding bureaucracy.

  • I find my leverage when the "what" is already decided. The services and roadmap were set before I arrived, so I focused on what I could shape: the experience. Using what I already knew about the audience from OYE, plus close observation of users as they arrived, I built a branded experience that delivered value and consistency without needing everything defined up front.

  • I learned to translate design for people who don't speak it. In a low-maturity org, half the job is making design value legible to non-designers, and I know now how much that translation matters and how to do it better.

  • I find honest signal on a shoestring. A scrappy proof-of-concept can prove the wrong thing, so limited resources are no excuse for skipping measurement, they're a reason to guard against the bias that makes cheap measurement lie. I know how to get a real read on user needs and perceptions with what's available.

A final, honest note:

I'm grateful for Puentes; it taught me what it takes to build and fund something as ambitious as narrative power for Latin America, and how to lead across cultures, languages, and identities. It was also a hard role. As the only person with a design background, I sometimes struggled to make the value of design legible to leadership, and I learned that fighting for that value is part of the job almost everywhere.

The clearest lesson: social impact and user impact are not the same thing. User impact isn't vanity metrics; it's making sure you're building the right thing, the thing that concretely improves people's lives. That's the conviction I'm taking into whatever comes next, and the kind of place I want to build it in: one where design sits at the table while those decisions get made.