From Latin America, scaling across the Global South
Instituto Update is a women-led organization working to transform incomplete democracies into participatory systems that promote collective Buen Vivir for all.
Mission
Strengthening initiatives and empowering innovative practices born from the political imagination of grassroots, Black, Indigenous, LBTQIA+, and young cis and trans women—bringing leaders and their territories closer to institutional politics
Vision
More participatory, people-centered political systems with greater diversity and representation across the Global South, alongside collectives, individuals, and institutions committed to climate, social, racial, and gender justice.
We are an infrastructure for democracy strengthening
WE EMPOWER political actors:
We produce knowledge, intelligence, data, innovations, and technologies that are transnationally replicable. We systematize, curate, and collectivize learning, while providing continuous political and technical training.
WE WEAVE networks and connections:
We create and strengthen the capacity for coordinated action among progressive leaders, coalitions, and initiatives across the Global South. We develop methodologies for collaboration and South-South solidarity among ecosystem actors, while structuring, sustaining, and nurturing learning communities.
WE IMAGINE new democratic futures:
We produce and champion political narratives and imaginaries to dream of alternative futures. We develop campaigns and engage communicators and political strategists to scale the reach of new narratives on politics and culture.
Diversity, equity, inclusion and justice are transversal and fundamental values.
We carry out regional projects for a more diverse and representative institutional policy, but we also seek to institutionalize these values within our own organization and in the community of partners and suppliers with whom we work.
Care, collaboration and representativeness: an exercise in participatory democracy.
Caring for people, collaboration and representativeness are part of our commitment to experimenting and exercising inside, what we seek outside: to promote the democratization and decentralization of spaces of power.
Transparency
Transparency is an indispensable element in building a less unequal, fairer and more reliable organization and political system.