MAY 2024
Visioning forward for collective impact
RISE Egypt hosts a meetup for our partners at the RISE office to reconnect and enhance collective clarity on ways the LEEP Collaborative can further benefit each organization individually and the social innovation ecosystem holistically as part of RISE’s 2030 vision.
APRIL 2024
Launching the 2nd round of the RISE university internship program
We welcome our second cohort of data interns to the RISE team, furthering previous work done on building data pipelines for the LEEP Innovation Map, analyzing development data gaps, synthesizing insights, and maximizing the impact of the map.
MAY 2023
LAUNCHING A NEW INTERNSHIP PROGRAM
We welcome our first cohort of data and graphic design interns to the RISE team. The internship program is centered around analyzing data gaps on the LEEP innovation map and bridging them, identifying data patterns, consolidating data pipelines, and improving communication through data storytelling.
FEBRUARY 2023
LEVERAGING INNOVATION MAPPING
The RISE team presents at the Startups Without Borders Summit, facilitating a workshop on innovation mapping and its importance in scaling up the impact of social enterprises.
NOVEMBER 2022
LEEP AT COP27 IN SHARM EL SHEIKH
RISE takes part in COP27, presenting the work done through LEEP for Collaborative Impact on mapping green innovations across Egypt.
JUNE 2022
LAUNCHING THE LEEP INNOVATION MAP
Building on LEEP’s mission of enhancing accessibility to a wealth of community-curated resources and fostering collective intelligence for community driven action, the digital innovation map of Egypt is launched. It’s an interactive map, showcasing innovations taking place on the ground with dynamic analytics on various key development indicators in Egypt.
FEBRUARY 2022
INTRODUCING THE LEEP INNOVATION CALENDAR
The innovation calendar is launched to offer a communal space for information exchange within the ecosystem, ranging from sector-specific content, to opportunities, grants and events.
JULY - DECEMBER 2021
Developing Community Data Resources
The second half of the year is dedicated to building visibility partnerships with key ecosystem players to streamline data pipelines feeding into and flowing out of the LEEP digital innovation map and the LEEP innovation calendar.
MAY 2021
THE STANFORD SOCIAL INNOVATION REVIEW RECOGNIzES LEEP
LEEP gets recognized as a leading initiative for collective impact globally. Dr Mona Mowafi presents at the Frontiers of Social Innovation Conference on citizen-led social innovation. Presenting alongside Sanjay Purohit, Chief Curator of Societal Platform in India, the talk reflected on how inclusive collaboration can lead to systems change.
JANUARY - JUNE 2021
INTERNAL EVALUATION OF THE LEEP PILOT
We use this period to assess whether we will move forward with a multi-stage scale-up of LEEP.
JULY - DECEMBER 2020
Diaspora Outreach & Positioning for Growth
By leveraging the RISE Global Ambassadors Program as well as outreach partnerships, we are activating professionals inside and outside of Egypt to participate in the LEEP community and connect across boundaries through our online/offline platform. RISE Egypt is also investing in boosting its systems and internal resources to position LEEP for growth in 2021.
FEBRUARY - JUNE 2020
LEEP Goes Online
with COVID-19
Within a few months, the coronavirus pandemic hits the globe and tests our community’s newly formed ties and our muscles for resiliency and adaptability. We re-imagine our programming and find new ways to establish a shared culture and deepen our bonds as a community as we adapt to this new reality.
Monthly Meetups & Platform Development
Community members engage in monthly meetups designed to enable connection, collaboration and knowledge exchange. Development and validation of the mobile app and web-based platform continues.
JANUARY 2020
LEEP community Launch and retreat
We launch a 1-year pilot with 37 start-ups from the education and environment sectors and begin testing the prototype of our online platform. This is the culmination of years of hard work, research and design. The pilot aims to grow a culture of collaboration and exchange amongst innovators from across Egypt.
OCTOBER 2019
Expanding our team
New team members join RISE Egypt to support the launch and pilot of LEEP for Collaborative Impact. HSBC joins as a corporate partner.
JUNE - SEPTEMBER 2019
Outreach in
Governorates
Field visits and focus groups with social entrepreneurs in the governorates are conducted to validate the programming and architecture of LEEP and to test assumptions from the early design phase. Recognizing that needs outside of Cairo may be qualitatively different, insights from these innovators were crucial to the final design of LEEP.
sharing best practices globally
Our team is invited to present our work developing LEEP for Collaborative Impact at the Digital Social Innovation (DSI) for European Union (EU) conference in Warsaw, Poland as well as a global data summit entitled ‘Codata: Towards Next-Generation Data Driven Science’ in Beijing, China.
FEBRUARY - MAY 2019
From concept to community
Taking our concept to action and the wider community, we join a retreat for social innovators run by ElRehla (The Journey). It’s a chance for purpose-driven startups to connect, reflect and learn from one another. We fine-tuned our ideas and got ready for the road ahead.
building a platform
From ideation to creation, we start building the design of what will become the LEEP platform. Conceived as a space that supports human connection and collective intelligence for community-driven collective action, the platform creates accessibility to a wealth of community-curated resources and serves as a catalyst for fostering collaboration.
JANUARY 2019
It all comes together
We share our vision of the LEEP for Collaborative Impact initiative with the world in this first sketch video. It explains what the platform will look, who it will benefit, and how it will tie together a community of innovators.
OCTOBER 2018
LEEP ACCELERATES
Pilot funding is secured by Drosos Foundation to move forward with building and testing this new innovative model to support the Egyptian social innovation ecosystem through evidence and collaboration.
MAY - JUNE 2018
Global best practices: Digital Mapping
To take things to the next level, we head on a global field study to establish best practices in digitizing maps for social impact. LEEP Director (Dr. Mona Mowafi) and Co-Manager for Strategy & Digital Social Innovation Lead (Ms. Noran Abdou) meet with experts from MIT’s Civic Data Design Lab and Azavea on how to create effective maps to inform social policy, the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative on how to enable mapping in remote areas, and the United Nations Data 4 SDGs on alignment with the SDGs for global benchmarking.
APRIL 2018
Mapping the Egyptian Social Innovation (SI) ecosystem
Building on a popular mapping exercise from the Solutions Summit, we explore technical issues around mapping innovation for sustainable development locally. Organizations that have engaged in mapping diverse sectors in Egypt come together to validate the idea of mapping Egyptian SIs while layering on open data to enable more effective development research and market analysis.
DECEMBER 2017 - MARCH 2018
Post summit: Validating ideas
Ideas such as digitizing a social innovation (DSI) map, centralizing a knowledge hub, and enabling visibility of resources that already exist in the ecosystem (to promote collaboration and avoid replication) are validated and integrated into a unified initiative. LEEP is born.
NOVEMBER 2017
New Ideas for Collaboration
RISE launches its first Solutions Summit to explore how we can do more, how we can co-create ideas for collaborative impact. While this first solution summit’s focus on the education sector, time and space was set aside to leverage the collective intelligence of participants to brainstorm and co-design ideas for a cross-sector collaborative that could spin out of the Summit and serve as a foundation to enable the wider innovation ecosystem for years to come. This is how the idea for LEEP was conceived.
First class of RISE fellows graduates
RISE’s first flagship program was a 2-year fellowship designed to help 5 early-growth stage social enterprises scale their impact through data-driven approaches and access to global advisors and learning partners. After graduating this first class of fellows, we begin to think big about the future and how to scale the most effective components of our program. What if the evidence-based resources and global network leveraged for these five teams could reach hundreds or even thousands more?