STORIES & INSIGHTS

‘Building communities is care work’: Innovating alongside others

Innovation is a complex, iterative process. Building online communities around that process can be critical to sparking real change — but comes with its own challenges.

Online community building is both hard and essential. Image: Sora, prompted by © UNHCR/Isaac Kiunga
Online community building is both hard and essential. Image: Sora, prompted by © UNHCR/Isaac Kiunga

In 2025, reeling from funding cuts, innovators across the United Nations system sought strength in community. “There is this the sense across the board that anything we can do to work together to decrease duplications, grow impact, and support each other emotionally in this crisis is something worth putting our time and energy into,” says Zsuzsa Nagy-Sandor, Innovation Officer at UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency.

To flourish, innovators need safe spaces to experiment with new ideas as well as collaborators to bounce ideas off. A robust community, built around a shared interest in and vision of innovation, can supply both. With budgets tightening and humanitarians experiencing increased pressure amid complex, protracted displacement crises, such support is essential to ensure new ideas get the oxygen they need to grow.

Zsuzsa is familiar with the central role community can play in successful innovation — and with the challenges of building such communities, particularly online. As 2026 gets underway, she and colleagues in UNHCR’s Innovation Learning team are reflecting on what they’ve learned.

Connection and continuous learning

Since 2013, the Innovation Fellowship, UNHCR Innovation’s oldest initiative, has upskilled more than 300 people. In 2020, Zsuzsa joined the team with a simple question: How could Fellowship alumni keep learning and innovating once the training ended? Conversations across roles, regions, and organizations revealed a clear need for connection — insight that led to the creation of the Innovation Alumni Network (IAN), a global community of UNHCR staff and partners working in diverse contexts.

At its core, IAN aims to create a space for connection, collaboration, and continuous learning. Since its launch in 2021, Zsuzsa — now alongside Senior Learning Assistant Aziret Zhakypbaev and alumni co-leads — has focused on keeping the community lively and self-sustaining.

Why innovation needs community

The exploratory and iterative nature of innovation makes community essential. “Innovation is a continuous practice,” Zsuzsa says. “Innovators are happy to encounter others in similar shoes — people they can bounce ideas off, who can empathise or suggest solutions.” Challenging the status quo is a long, uphill process, and having peers who believe in the work can make the difference between simply having an idea and having the confidence to test, adapt, and try again.

That experimentation involves risk. As Azi — who now leads the community-building work — notes, IAN offers a safe, supportive space where “failing and learning from failure and getting peer support from others” is part of the process.

For many members, innovation is not a formal job function but rather a mindset they bring to their work. IAN helps keep this mindset alive by fostering connection, shared learning, and exposure to diverse perspectives across countries and disciplines. This diversity is a central feature, enabling innovators to test, cross-pollinate, and refine ideas in conversation with members based across more than 50 countries and working in 16 organizations.

Trial and error

The benefits of community are legion, but — as Zsuzsa is quick to note — “Community is not a solution for everything. It’s not something you create and then it works and then you’re good to go. It needs continuous care — and it needs to be based around real needs and real preferences and real people.”

IAN is a work in progress, a dynamic online space where Azi and Zsuzsa are always testing new ways of community building. When the network first launched, it took a dual approach, offering experience sharing and learning sessions as well as informal networking. “There was a lot of trial and error around, for instance, how can I spark people to have conversations?” Zsuzsa recalls. “And assessing: What communication channels do we have? Are they used? Are they useful?” These remain core questions.
 
The community operates fully online, requiring constant experimentation with digital tools (Teams, Linkedin, Viva Engage), while working to manage the technological overload its members could be experiencing. Azi and Zsuzsa may be the architects, but a community functions best when its members are engaged, empowered, and able to proactively reach out to each other for mutual aid. To support this, the team has tried various ways to catalogue and broadcast the various skillsets of its membership — something that has proven challenging in a fast-paced humanitarian environment.
 
In recent years, Azi says, the focus has been on “how to make the community more self-sustaining and self-reliant and autonomous.” One key move in that direction has been the co-leadership initiative — empowering a new pair of IAN members every six months to co-create events and nurture community engagement.
 
France. UNHCR event brings inspirational refugees face to face with schoolkids © UNHCR/Kate Thompson-Gorry
France. UNHCR event brings inspirational refugees face to face with schoolkids © UNHCR/Kate Thompson-Gorry

A group effort

For Giovani Castellani Zanini and Roos Middelkoop, serving as an IAN co-lead has been a way to give back to the Learning team — and to deepen their engagement with innovation.

When Roos applied to the Fellowship, in 2022, she was doing partnerships work with UNFPA in Bangladesh. The training made an impression on her because it was hands-on and expansive on a personal and professional level. Upon completion, she found IAN to be almost a “prolongation of the Fellowship … because you can still feel, especially in the gatherings, the same energy, the same curiosity from people.” Becoming an IAN co-lead was, she felt, a natural continuation of the way that Fellows are encouraged to be active participants and leaders of their learning journey.

For Giovani, the Fellowship provided exciting encounters with UNHCR colleagues in Country Operations related to his work — the procurement of IT supplies in emergencies. “We didn’t speak only about logistics, we spoke about everything,” he recalls. “I was able to understand how they work and what’s painful for them — and try to help with my work as well.” His curiosity and creativity led him to start supporting Azi on some of the community work, and then to apply to be a co-lead.

In conversation with Azi and the other community members, co-leads build on the work of their predecessors while also inhabiting the position in ways unique to them. One key function they perform is simply acting as another pair of eyes and ears, facilitating conversations with IAN members and ensuring the community is a two-way street, shaped by all its members. “I think [co-leadership] is really about listening a lot and showing up,” Roos says. “When you talk about community, it’s about: What kind of space do you offer to people? And what kind of worlds are you building together?”

Getting on with the work

UNHCR, like other actors in the humanitarian and development sectors, has been hit hard by funding constraints. Over the course of 2025, IAN’s membership dropped from 220 to 185, due to staffing cuts across UNHCR. (While departing colleagues are welcome to stay in the network, some do not, for various reasons.) Nevertheless, attendance at live events has remained consistently strong. “That’s where we see the biggest interest and get the most positive feedback,” Azi says.

In 2025, topics covered during these events included, among others, how refugee-led storytelling can counter misinformation and build empathy, how philosophy and ethics can shape innovation for good, and the growing threat of digital risks to forcibly displaced communities. Tracking attendance at these events has enabled the team to identify a core group of keen innovators, as well as those who might benefit from more direct engagement. Such metrics also assist in the monitoring and evaluation of the community, which can otherwise prove challenging.

Aware of the strain members are under, the team has settled into a regular rhythm of quarterly email newsletters, monthly events, and biweekly online engagement opportunities. “One of the main objectives of this strategy is to reduce community fatigue by making sure that people are not overwhelmed with information,” Azi says.

For the Innovation Learning team, this work is both hard and essential. “Something I think is important to note is that building communities is care work,” Zsuzsa says:

“It takes a lot of a person. It’s not just something you do administratively. It’s something you really pour yourself into and it can be challenging. It can be hard to keep posting into an empty Teams space or keep sending emails you never get answers to. It can feel like you’re shouting into a void. But when you do get that feedback, when you do talk to the people, and you get affirmation that this is important and meaningful to them — that it’s keeping their commitment to innovation alive — that means a lot.”

Learn more about IAN and the Innovation Fellowship.