Introducing the Updraft
We are excited to announce the launch of The Updraft, a global creative democracy incubator. For anyone who is confused about the name, an updraft is the column of rising warm air that lets a bird climb without flapping too much. It finds the current and gets carried higher than it could manage alone. That same rising air, at scale, is what builds a thunderstorm, with warm air stacking up as potential energy until it finally has somewhere to go. It isn't a perfect metaphor, but what we want it to carry is the sense of shared lift, the notion that people rise faster and reach further together than alone, of powerful potential energy, that electric feeling you get when a summer storm is brewing after a long drought.
The Updraft is an incubator for people doing democratic work across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, built around three tracks: culture and movement building, law and policy in closing spaces, and technology. Around those tracks sits a network that connects practitioners to each other, funding for the ideas worth backing, and the gatherings, training, and research that keep the work moving. Its shape comes from years inside this field and two things it keeps getting wrong.
The first is an assumption baked into the field, that American and European democracy is the finished product and everyone else is a few laps behind on the same track. That framing was always unfair to the practitioners it cast as students, people doing inventive, high-stakes democratic work of their own. It looks stranger still today. The "finished" democracies are the ones backsliding hardest, and the practical knowledge for pushing back tends to sit with the very people the field spent decades lecturing.
The second is a question of where the resources went. Most of the money and attention has gone to formal machinery: elections, institutions, procedures. Far less has gone to what makes people feel democracy is theirs, that sense of belonging to something larger than themselves. Strip that out, and what remains is procedure. People drift away from procedure.
Belonging is what The Updraft is trying to build. Each track is a different route toward it.
Culture and movement building is the part the field neglects most: the joy, art, and creative practice that keep people connected when formal channels fail them. A recent Curious Shapes piece for the Kettering Foundation makes this case through Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show, of all things. He closed by naming every country in the Americas, and for a few minutes millions of people felt part of something that ran past their own borders. That feeling is the raw material a shared democratic vision gets built from, and the field mostly treats it as an afterthought.
Law and policy work happens in closing spaces. Rule of law is eroding in many places at once, but there is still real ground to hold, and sometimes to gain, even if it comes in inches. The Updraft is building this track with Catherine Anite, who led UPROAR (uproar.fyi) and grounded UN human rights processes in local realities, winning traction with policymakers and coalitions across Africa. It is slow work that rewards creativity and a feel for local politics, and for the openings when they appear. Funders tend to assume nothing is possible in these environments. Plenty is.
Technology is the third track, and it starts from what already exists, which is mostly defensive: surveillance, censorship circumvention, keeping people safe on an internet that now runs largely on extraction and control. That work continues, with our partner Digital Society Africa. The track also pushes a pro-democracy vision for technology that does not pretend the harms away, takes them seriously, and still asks the useful questions. What is worth building, and who gets to build it.
The Updraft is hiring now, with more coming over the next few months. The open roles, the full program, and network signup are all at curiousshapes.org/updraft.