Fifteen years ago, Open Briefing started with a big idea: helping nonprofits and foundations achieve social change through intelligence and investigations that strengthened their campaigns and decision-making.

Since then, we have evolved in response to the changing threats facing defenders and movements, and the growing demand for specialist support. Listening, learning, and adapting have shaped our journey, but our purpose remains consistent: to help people and movements stay safe, resilient, and able to continue their work under pressure.

OUR HISTORY 

From a small, volunteer team led by our founder and CEO, Chris Abbott, in Cornwall in the southwest of England, we undertook pioneering work on corruption in pharmaceutical supply chains, armed drones, and private military companies. We shaped strategies, influenced policy, and helped advance citizen-led investigative journalism.

As our work brought us closer to people operating in increasingly challenging environments, we recognised that information about risk was only part of the solution. People also needed practical support to manage those risks.

In 2016, we shifted our focus from intelligence and investigations to security risk management. Within two years, we had embraced a holistic security approach that combined physical, digital, and psychosocial security. We built an international team of protection specialists, risk managers, technologists, digital security consultants, counsellors, psychologists, and coaches, with experience rooted in human rights movements and humanitarian action.

In 2019, we launched our rapid response mechanism, making holistic security support freely available to under-resourced defenders and organisations around the world. Our work increasingly focused on people and movements on the frontlines of social and environmental change.

By 2023, demand had grown in both scale and complexity. The cases we were supporting involved intersecting physical, digital, and psychological harms, perpetrated by highly capable adversaries acting with increasing impunity. In response, we embarked on an ambitious three-year strategy, significantly increasing our funding and rapidly growing our global team.

An external impact evaluation at the end of this strategic period found that our most significant long-term impact was helping restore agency, continuity, and confidence in contexts where fear, threat, and burnout could otherwise have stopped people’s work entirely.

Behind this evolution are the people who have helped shape Open Briefing’s work and culture. In another ‘Open Briefing at 15’ feature article, colleagues share their personal journeys, what they’ve learned from one another, and how we’re building a culture of care across our global team.

Meet the people behind Open Briefing

MAKING OUR IMPACT VISIBLE

The impact of protection work is not always easy to measure. Some of the most important outcomes are what does not happen: a defender does not have to withdraw, an organisation continues operating, or a team can make the right choices in the face of threats.

Our monitoring since 2020 provides a picture of the reach and outcomes of our work.

Since 2020, we have:

• Responded to 2,640 calls for support across more than 100 countries.
• Delivered more than 30,000 hours of tailored holistic security support.
• Trained more than 7,000 human rights defenders through nearly 1,000 holistic security workshops.

Between 2020 and 2025, the defenders and organisations we supported reported an average 22% increase in their capacity to manage risk and a 12% decrease in risk. The median approval rating for our work was 86%.

Our growth during that period also reflected our increased capacity to respond:

• Our team grew from 3.26 to 18.4 full-time equivalent (FTE) staff.
• Our geographical reach expanded from 46 countries to more than 100.
• Our annual income grew from £662,000 to £2.02 million.

This growth has been made possible by a committed community of foundations and philanthropists, whose support has enabled us to reach more people and respond to a wider range of threats.

TELLING THE STORY 

Behind these numbers are thousands of people and organisations facing different circumstances and risks. Their experiences show how tailored support can protect individuals, strengthen organisations, and build collective capacity.

Individual protection: In Mauritius, we partnered with the Human Dignity Trust and Collectif Arc-En-Ciel to support LGBTQIA+ activist Abdool Ridwan Firaas Ah Seek (Ryan) in challenging a colonial-era law criminalising same-sex intimacy. Our holistic response combined tailored risk assessments, physical and digital security planning, and ongoing wellbeing support to help Ryan navigate public scrutiny, harassment and potential backlash throughout the legal proceedings. In October 2023, the Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional, decriminalising same-sex intimacy after 186 years. Our work to safeguard the plaintiff in this landmark case demonstrates how person-centred, context-sensitive holistic security support can help activists not only take on high-risk legal challenges, but sustain their human rights advocacy over the long term. 

Organisational resilience: In Mexico, we partnered with Caminos de Agua, a grassroots organisation working to improve access to clean water, whose team faced serious security threats while working in areas affected by organised crime and resource disputes. Together, we conducted a comprehensive risk assessment, delivered team-wide risk-awareness workshops, and developed tailored security measures for the organisation’s staff, field activities and community partnerships. We also helped establish a dedicated security focal point and incident-reporting processes, embedding security into the organisation’s day-to-day work. The impact of this work was shared by their Executive Director: 

“Open Briefing’s expertise has been revolutionary for our organisation. All of this was done in a way specifically designed for our organisation and considering our own limitations. Thanks to this incredibly in-depth and thorough experience with Open Briefing, we are now implementing a comprehensive security plan that will protect not only our staff but also our community partners.”

Collective protection: At COP do Povo in Belém, Brazil, we worked with environmental defenders, Indigenous leaders, grassroots movements, and civil society organisations to strengthen collective protection around people-led climate action. Strengthening relationships and shared knowledge across physical, digital, and psychological threats helped further strengthen the foundations of more coordinated, locally rooted protection.

Together, these three examples from thousands of cases illustrate how our holistic security support can support individuals facing immediate threats, strengthen individual and organisational resilience, and build protection across communities and movements.

To mark our 15th anniversary, we also brought together reflections from partners and team members around the world in a film exploring how our work has evolved, what we have learned together, and what it takes to sustain people and movements leading change under pressure. Their voices reflect the relationships, shared learning and collective commitment at the heart of our work, as well as our vision for our next chapter.

These experiences also echo the findings of an external impact evaluation, commissioned as we neared the end of our 2023–26 strategy. Drawing on three months of research and conversations with defenders, partners, clients, funders and our team, the evaluation found that our ultimate impact lies not in eliminating risk, but in helping people and organisations continue their work where fear, threat, or burnout might otherwise have forced them to pause, withdraw, or collapse. 

The evaluation found that we support them to think clearly, make decisions, and act deliberately in high-risk situations. As a result, security, risk, and wellbeing practices become embedded in organisations and continue over time. They also spread through movements, networks, and communities, creating lasting ripple effects beyond our immediate engagement.

These findings and the stories behind our work reinforce why we understand protection as more than responding to immediate threats. It is also about sustaining the people, relationships and collective capacity that make change possible over time.

WHAT COMES NEXT – EVOLVING FOR REGENERATION AND SCALE 

The challenges facing defenders continue to intensify. Physical attacks increasingly intersect with digital surveillance, harassment, criminalisation, stress, and burnout.

Over the past five years, calls for our assistance have increased six-fold, reaching 774 in 2025 alone. Environmental defenders in particular account for a growing share of our cases, rising from 31% in 2020 to 39% in 2026. This reflects the increasing pressures facing those on the frontlines of climate action, working to protect land, water, Indigenous communities, and the environment. 

This growing demand reflects both the trust placed in our work and the increasingly difficult conditions in which social and environmental change takes place. Yet no single organisation can meet this need alone.

So we are scaling in a different way. We will continue to provide accompaniment and advisory support to those facing complex and high-risk situations. But through our 2026–29 strategy, we will also work more deliberately to strengthen the wider protection ecosystem – sharing knowledge, building partnerships, and helping others adapt and embed holistic security approaches in their own contexts.

This is the shift towards regenerative protection: support that responds to immediate risk while strengthening the conditions that help people and movements continue their work with confidence, clarity, and care.

15 YEARS… AND COUNTING 

Over the past 15 years, one principle has remained constant: people drive social change, and our role is to help them continue.

Our numbers demonstrate the scale of our work, but the ultimate measure of impact is what defenders and movements can continue to do: organise, defend their rights, protect their land and communities, and pursue long-term social and environmental change more safely and effectively. 

After 15 years, that remains at the heart of Open Briefing. As the challenges grow, so does our ambition: to work alongside those driving change today while strengthening the wider systems and relationships that will help them keep going tomorrow.