Protection starts with people
Since 2011, Open Briefing has worked alongside people and movements leading change under pressure, helping strengthen their protection, wellbeing, and resilience. Over that time, the threats they face have evolved, as has our understanding of what it takes not only to sustain action, but to build the conditions for people and movements to recover, adapt, and thrive under pressure.
As we mark our 15th anniversary, we are reflecting on lessons drawn from our work with the defenders, organisations, movements, and foundations we have had the privilege to collaborate with. From building trust and sharing power, to strengthening collective protection and embracing regenerative approaches, these lessons reflect what we have learned, what guides our work today, and how we can help strengthen the resilience and capacity needed to sustain social and environmental change over the long term.
In this first instalment of a three-part series, we explore how protection starts with people: why changemakers must be at the centre, why protection needs to be regenerative, and why trust, context, local knowledge, and shared power are essential to effective support.
1. THERE IS NO CHANGE WITHOUT CHANGEMAKERS
Systems do not change themselves. People do. Every advance in rights, justice, and accountability ultimately depends on people willing to organise, act, and persist. This work relies on relationships, knowledge, and the capacity to work together over time.
Protecting and strengthening those foundations is therefore not separate from social and environmental change. It is part of the infrastructure that makes change possible. If we want people and movements to be able to resist, organise, and advocate, we need to invest in the conditions that allow them to do so.
2. PROTECTION MUST BE REGENERATIVE
Over the past 15 years, the threats facing people and movements leading change have become more complex, persistent and interconnected. Surveillance, online harassment, disinformation, criminalisation, and legal threats now combine with physical violence, displacement, and prolonged psychological pressure. For many defenders, risk is no longer an isolated incident but a sustained condition of working.
Protection therefore cannot focus solely on immediate threats. Defenders and movements working under sustained pressure need the foundations that allow them to recover, adapt and replenish the resources that sustain their work. The challenge is not simply helping people survive risk, but renewing the people, relationships, and wider conditions needed to sustain collective action.
This is the thinking behind regenerative protection: an approach that looks beyond managing immediate risks to strengthening the long-term resilience of people and movements to continue their work.
3. BUILD WITH, NOT FOR
Those closest to a risk usually understand it best. They know their context, relationships, and constraints in ways that others never could. Lived experience and local knowledge are essential forms of expertise, alongside the technical knowledge and skills we can contribute.
Our role is not to arrive with predetermined ‘solutions,’ but to listen, understand, and work alongside defenders and movements to identify their priorities and co-design protection and wellbeing responses that reflect their needs and circumstances.
In Brazil, our work alongside quilombola communities reinforced the importance of recognising and building on knowledge that already exists within communities. As our response coordinator, Carla Vitória reflected:
“Our role is to help facilitate the answers that already exist within the community, while sharing some of the lessons we have learned alongside defenders in other contexts.”
4. PROTECTION AND WELLBEING ARE FUNDAMENTALLY RELATIONAL
The strongest protection and wellbeing work starts with effective relationships between people navigating challenging situations. Trust takes time to build. It requires careful listening, understanding people in the context of their lives and communities, and creating space for honest conversations about risk, capacity, and what is needed.
It also means being willing to act as a critical friend. Sometimes the most valuable thing we can offer is a different perspective: challenging assumptions, identifying blind spots, or asking difficult questions. Being a trusted partner does not simply mean telling people what they want to hear. Trust also means being willing to have our own assumptions challenged.
How we work with people can be just as important as the technical expertise we offer. Good protection requires us to know when to listen, when to challenge, when to guide, and when to step back.
5. CONTEXT SHAPES WHAT EFFECTIVE PROTECTION LOOKS LIKE
There is no universal, one-size-fits-all security solution. What makes sense for an activist in exile in West Africa may be completely inappropriate for an Indigenous, land, and environmental defender in Southeast Asia, or a high-profile nonprofit facing a campaign of online harassment in North America.
Effective protection is shaped by people’s social and ecological worlds. We worked in 68 countries last year, and it would be impossible for us to have team members in every one or be experts in each context. But we do not need to be. Our distributed, remote-first model has been deliberately designed to build strong relationships, draw on local knowledge, and bring specialist expertise together with learning from other contexts.
That exchange matters. A risk faced in one place may offer useful insight for defenders working elsewhere – not as a template to copy, but as another perspective to consider and adapt. Working across contexts gives us a broader view of what protection can look like while keeping the needs and realities of every defender and movement at the centre of our response.
6. PROTECTION SHOULD SHIFT POWER
Protection should leave defenders and movements with greater agency, not greater dependence on the organisation supporting them. This means not only sharing knowledge and building individual skills, but also recognising and building on the expertise, leadership, and decision-making capacity that already exists within communities and organisations.
In West Africa, our work with an LGBTQIA+ rights organisation evolved from providing tailored digital security support to co-creating training materials that its own team could adapt and deliver within their communities. Five staff members were trained to facilitate these sessions, helping extend access to digital safety knowledge beyond the initial engagement. As the organisation reflected:
“You reminded us that digital safety is a shared responsibility, if one person is harmed, we are all affected. The participants all shared that they now have a clear understanding of the training and feel fully equipped to pass the knowledge across to our community.”
Shifting power means supporting defenders and movements to identify, monitor, and manage risk; make more informed decisions; and determine what protection means for them over the long term.
PROTECTION STARTS WITH PEOPLE
These six lessons reflect a central belief that shapes Open Briefing’s work: effective protection starts with people, not systems or solutions imposed from outside. Trust, local knowledge, context, and shared power are not optional additions to technical protection and wellbeing work. They help shape whether that work is appropriate, effective, and sustainable. In the next instalment, we explore what this means in practice: why protection must be a shared responsibility, why care is strategy, and how support can strengthen collective resilience.