Op Ed: Leaving the Valley
RIl Global Director speaks about the innovation of RIL, the challenges of differentiating in the complex environment of humanitarian aid, and how we are building back better.
As RIL launches its new website, I was hoping to use this opportunity to take stock of the road that we have covered since our launch. However, I am finding it quite challenging to pinpoint Response Innovation Lab’s actual date of birth. Had we founders known that this unlikely experiment in collaboration would survive exposure to reality, maybe they would have taken the time to identify a moment, THE moment, when RIL went from an idea to something more tangible. Looking back, perhaps it was in 2015 when Jennifer MacCann and her colleagues at World Vision decided to open a space for innovators to interact with humanitarians responding to the devastating earthquake in Nepal. Or perhaps, our friends in the Legal Department would point to April 29, 2019, when the fifth of our five Founding Members added their signature on our global Collaboration Agreement as the date when RIL became, ahem, real.
If you were to ask me, I would tell you about a meeting I attended three years ago (January 18th-24th, 2017) in San Francisco.
Jennifer had been traveling the globe trying to convince INGOs and other partners to join World Vision in what was then known as the Crisis Response Innovation Lab. And so a small group of innovation-focused humanitarian and humanitarian-focused innovators met at a beautiful Swissnex facility on the Embarcadero and with a clear view to the Golden Gate Bridge, to lay down the basic framework of our model, approach, processes and figure out how this could work. As we hurtled from brainstorming to ideation session, we turned into believers, and RIL became something, well, real.
Somehow, in 2020, it feels both appropriate and wrong to list San Francisco as our birthplace.
For an initiative that is relentlessly, obsessively field-focused, RIL should claim inception far, far away from one of the wealthiest cities in the wealthiest nation in the world.