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
I was hired in 2020 coordinate Inspiratorio, building the platform from scratch to house six online learning services 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].
OUTCOMESGrew 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 PROBLEMWhen 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 ROLEMy 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; it became the baseline for every service that followed.
Service blueprints act as scaffolding for digital services, helping the team prepare and deliver in ways users enjoy, value and find consistent.
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.
You don't beat fatigue with more urgency
THE EXPERIENCE DESIGNI brought one conviction from OYE: you counter apocalyptic fatigue (Stoknes' term for the freeze doom produces) not with more urgency, but with safety, play, and creativity (Ingrid Fetell-Lee’s Aesthetic’s of Joy). So I shaped how Inspiratorio feels, and how its people show up: hosts making a space safe to experiment, not experts prescribing solutions.
Then Puentes taught me belonging and hope
OYE taught me creative permission, but its users shared a common ideological ground (feminism), so community came easily. Inspiratorio didn't have that common ground. With users across countries, cultures, causes, and identities, and no settled definition of the work, community had to be designed. So I designed for belonging, in the Othering & Belonging Institute's sense: a space people enter as themselves. And I designed for hope, in the sense of Thomas Coombes’ Hope-based comms.
I can't fully prove the results, and that's the finding
WHAT I'D FIXThe platform was never properly instrumented. Impact was tracked for narrative change, not the platform, so I have no clean retention data. What I have is five years of watching a core of participants stay with us across almost everything we ran. An NPS I introduced got read as satisfaction; the open answers I trusted most went unread. I'd fix that from day one.