Case study · Funder-sponsored grantee network · 2025 to 2027
Fourteen movement organizations. 57% felt exposed online. Here is what changed.
A national philanthropic intermediary asked us to help the small organizations it funds get safer online. They are Black-led, LGBTQ+-led, disability-led, and justice-focused groups, most with 6 to 50 people and little or no tech budget. We ran four live trainings for the network in 2025, then moved to one-on-one coaching for a smaller cohort in 2026.
The funder and the organizations are not named on this page. That is their call, not ours, and we keep it. Everything below is aggregate or has written consent.
Where they started
Pre-session survey, 14 organizations, September 2025. Aggregate only; no organization is identifiable.How the numbers shaped the training
We did not teach what we planned to teach. We taught what the survey said.
57% at a 1 or 2
So we started at the foundation, not the advanced track: four habits anyone can keep, and a fourth session built entirely around raising confidence, not adding tools.
71% already phished
So “Confirm authenticity” led every session, with live examples from their own inboxes, and the incident plan became the first deliverable instead of the last.
43% harassed, 29% surveilled
So doxxing defense and footprint cleanup got their own session, and we moved sensitive conversations to secure messaging before anything else.
“Talk it through, then give us a guide”
So every session was 60 minutes of content and 30 of live help, and every organization left with a one-page step-by-step guide, not a slide deck.
One write-in summed up the whole room:
What we did
July 2025 · Session 1
Digital resilience for LGBTQ+ leaders
Doxxing, anti-queer and anti-trans misinformation, and how to shrink your footprint before someone goes looking. 60 minutes of content, 30 minutes of hands-on help.
August 2025 · Session 2
Our stories, our security
AI, intersectional justice, and shared vulnerabilities. How the same tools that surveil communities can be understood and pushed back on.
September 2025 · Session 3
Collaborative help session
Built from the survey above. Incident response, secure comms, social media lockdown, and personal privacy, worked live with the organizations in the room.
November 2025 · Session 4
From vulnerability to strength
A practical exercise to raise digital confidence, delivered with ASL and Spanish interpretation and live captions.
The method
Every session and every coaching plan runs on our 4C model: Control exposure, Create strong credentials, Confirm authenticity, Clean up digital footprints. Four verbs an organizer can remember under stress.
Then one-on-one
In June 2026 the funder brought us back for a year of direct coaching with a small cohort: an intake and threat-modeling call, working sessions, and a short “Security practices we can actually keep” document each organization co-writes with us and owns.
Accessible by default
Interpretation, captions, low-bandwidth materials, screen-reader friendly templates, and confidentiality for sensitive work. Organizers should not have to ask for these.
What changed
Coaching cohort runs June 2026 to May 2027. Figures fill in as the tracker closes.Figure to come
Average 4C confidence score, intake to close, across the cohort.
Figure to come
organizations with MFA on every key account and a password manager in use.
Figure to come
organizations that completed a self-doxing cleanup and moved sensitive conversations to secure messaging.
Figure to come
organizations with a named security champion and a written practices document they own.
In their words
Quote to come. We publish testimonials only with written consent.
Quote to come, with written consent.
Quote to come. We publish testimonials only with written consent.
What this means if you run a small organization
You are probably in the same place these fourteen were: phishing has already found you, confidence is low, and nobody has time. The fix is not a product. It is four habits, a plan for the bad day, and someone to call. That is what the Clinic does, and a funder can sponsor it for a whole network at once.
Fund a network, or protect your own organization.
How you can help
Fund the next cohort of organizations.
Most of the organizations in this story could not have paid for this work. A funder did.