SHIELD connects grassroots organizations, practitioners, and young people already working on the front lines of online safety, then helps that work reach the people and institutions positioned to act on it.
The Network
SHIELD’s network is built through direct relationships, not sign-up forms. Leadership sits with the people closest to each issue, co-designing solutions rather than receiving them from outside.
The Youth Council extends that same model to young people specifically, currently forming its first cohort across seven countries and eight languages.
What the network has built
hours of free educational content
event attendees reached
recording views
The knowledge
Amplifying the voices of community leaders, youth advocates, and experts on the frontlines of digital safety.
OpenAI’s new Teen Mode promises stronger parental controls, study-focused learning, and additional safeguards for young users. As a teenager, I welcome these changes, but I also wonder whether they come too late.
2026 Conference outputs: Two Theories of Change
The first works through laws and platform accountability, producing evidence that governments and companies can act on. It has built real infrastructure, but it needs harm to already be visible and measurable before those larger bodies can respond.
The second is built by the people working directly in the communities affected, shaped by the specific conditions of the specific people and places they know. It produces solutions that work where the harm is actually happening, but it operates almost entirely without the funding or recognition the first approach gets.
Operates with very limited resources, low recognition, and without sophisticated infrastructure.
Across sessions spanning different regions and types of harm, four learnings kept surfacing.
Responses concentrate where harm is easiest to see, not where it starts. Harm begins earlier, in design decisions and community contexts systems were never built to notice.
Removing a threat doesn’t build the capacity to navigate the next one, and resilience can’t be treated as optional.
You’ve probably heard plenty of people talking about online safety problems. SHIELD works differently. We support the people already solving them.
Right now:
These leaders have solutions. What they need is support, connection, and amplification.
Your donation doesn’t fund SHIELD to ‘fix’ online safety for communities. It funds SHIELD to:
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