Our vision
Digital technology must serve our needs and wellbeing.
We know it has the potential to create connection, spark creativity, and provide a space of freedom and choice, because that was the promise of the early internet.
But as state and corporate control tightened their grip on digital tools, that promise has narrowed.
We want to change that trajectory, motivated by a radical vision: to restore the liberating potential of technology so that it serves people, planet, and the public good – particularly those historically marginalised.
In the end our pursuit isn’t really about technology at all. It’s about the world we want to live in.
We work in partnership
Navigating technology's promise and pitfalls requires all of us.
Luminate is seeking partnerships to resource and strengthen the movement for a more equitable digital age.
We bring experience, expertise, and a global network – and we want to learn and experiment alongside you. Let's imagine technology that reflects our best values and protects our rights.
Our programmes
We bring together a diverse ecosystem of organisations working at the intersection of technology and social justice across Africa, with a focus on the big tech start-up markets and societies like Nigeria and Kenya, where we have staff. Our funding is aimed at ensuring access, inclusion, and opportunity for African leadership in the digital transformation.
We work with partners across Asia to maximise opportunities for good governance research into the impacts of tech on society. Our deep-rooted local expertise means we understand colonial legacies that transfer into 21st century digital power.
We work in Europe to ensure Big Tech corporations do not harm people, society, or the planet and to pave the way for a just tech future. Our teams in the EU and UK do this by funding strategies to leverage Europe's regulators, courts, and storytellers to challenge the concentration of political and economic power over our rights, economies, information sphere, and democracies.
We support organisations across Latin America to integrate digital rights into broader issues of democracy, climate, and labour. Across these areas we support work to drive policy reform and enforcement, advance racial justice, protect election integrity, and address market concentration of tech companies. We maximise impact in the largest internet society in Latin America in Brazil.
We strengthen the foundational infrastructure of the global tech and social justice fields. We support resilience, narrative power, and connections across regions, sectors, and movements, and enable people and organisations to experiment with new ideas and approaches to challenge borderless tech harms. Our work investigates and exposes the tech industry and governments’ abuses of power, and links local and global initiatives so they can advance each other's work.