Belonging and community
What helps people form lasting relationships, mutual support and a sense of belonging?
An emerging public-benefit initiative
Room for people
to flourish.
Akhdar explores how people and societies can thrive. We aim to connect public research, collaboration and practical action around the challenges that shape everyday life.
Discover our purposeAkhdar / أخضر / greenFor people, communities and the places we share.
01 / ABOUT AKHDAR
A name that means green.
A belief in what can grow.
Green brings to mind life, renewal and gardens. For us, it speaks to the conditions people need to grow: connection, safety, health, opportunity and a say in the systems around them.
Akhdar is evolving into an inclusive, nonpartisan initiative for public benefit. Our purpose is to understand challenges affecting people and communities, share what we learn and work with others on responses that are useful in real life.
02 / THE QUESTIONS WE FOLLOW
Six areas.
One shared world.
These six areas guide the questions we ask. They overlap in real lives, so we will approach them with curiosity and care.
Health and wellbeing
How can care and everyday conditions support physical and mental wellbeing?
Livelihood and opportunity
What helps people build a stable life and access meaningful work and opportunity?
Climate and environment
How can people prepare for environmental change and care for the places they share?
Safety, justice and dignity
What helps people stay safe, seek justice and be treated with dignity?
Learning and identity
How can people access knowledge, explore who they are and participate with confidence?
A SECOND LAYER / AN EVOLVING METHOD
Looking at belonging and community.
Each area is shaped by more than one force. These five questions help us look closer before deciding what might help. Select another area above to explore it.
Who shapes the spaces where people gather, and whose voice counts?
Can people reach welcoming places and the means to get there?
How do language, faith, traditions and shared experiences create connection?
Do digital spaces help people express themselves and sustain relationships?
Who has the time and support to build and maintain relationships?
These are questions to investigate, not conclusions we have already reached.
03 / HOW WE HOPE TO WORK
From understanding
to useful action.
Akhdar is at an early stage. This is the direction we are building towards, shaped by what people tell us and what careful research reveals.
Make questions public.
Investigate lived experience, existing evidence and gaps in how people are served. Share findings in forms that others can examine and use.
Work across disciplines.
Bring communities, researchers and practitioners into the same conversation, with the people affected helping to shape priorities.
Try what might help.
Over time, develop and test community programmes or other practical responses, learn from their results and improve them.
EARLY RESEARCH DIRECTION
Start with the conditions
of everyday life.
Our initial questions include how people form lasting connections, what makes support accessible, and how institutions or technologies affect a person’s ability to participate and make choices. These are questions to investigate with people, not findings we have already reached.
04 / WHERE WE BEGIN
A STARTING QUESTION
What helps us
feel we belong?
Belonging is our first area of exploration. We are listening to how people experience community and asking what could make connection more welcoming and durable.
01
Conversations
Maryam Talks opens up questions about community, identity and social life. Those conversations can help us learn what people value and what they find missing.
02
Related experiments
Galaxie is a separate social product exploring calmer ways to express ourselves and connect online. Its design questions offer another perspective on belonging.
Explore Galaxie 05 / PEOPLE AND TECHNOLOGY
Technology should
expand human possibility.
Some of the systems shaping daily life are digital. Human-adaptive research asks how those systems affect people in context: the effort they demand, the choices they leave open, and their effects on learning, wellbeing and relationships.
That perspective could help Akhdar investigate where technology supports participation and where it creates new barriers. It is one tool among many. Listening, public research, local knowledge and practical programmes matter just as much.
POSSIBLE COLLABORATIONS
Akhdar may collaborate with Thirty Labs on human-facing technology and draw on work from Particular to examine how systems affect people. Any such collaboration would serve Akhdar’s public-benefit purpose; Akhdar’s mission is broader than any one technology or partner.
06 / COLLABORATE
Good questions
need many voices.
Akhdar is taking shape. We hope to work with people who bring lived experience, local knowledge, research or practical skills to the questions we explore.
Collaboration could mean shaping a question together, sharing evidence, or eventually testing an idea in a community. We want the people closest to a challenge to have a real part in deciding what is useful.
AN INVITATION TO THINK TOGETHERA growing effort
We begin by listening.
Then move with care.
Akhdar is still taking shape. We hope its research and future collaborations will make room for more people to flourish.
Back to the beginning