Thanks to Sarah Abdelatif, Helen Nonhoff, and Mirthe van der Heide for giving me a tour of Propel, a knowledge management platform for the humanitarian sector that turns scattered project insights into shared, searchable organizational memory. The platform is great. Intuitive, concrete and helpful.

It caught my eye because I think a lot about the loss of institutional memory in the non-profit sector, especially for more marginal, less well-funded work. As people move on knowledge, insight, and their courageous experimentation goes with them. And whoever comes next, without meaning to, reinvents the wheel.

It was interesting to see how AI was boosting the project to create synthesized knowledge maps across a lot, like really a lot, of data. Data which included storytelling and informal debriefs. I learned about learning debriefs which have become standard in international NGOs with funders like UNDP. Would that there was more of that habit here, and the funding to go with it.

I read today in Governing (from an April 2026 article) that Philadelphia has a new training initiative for community violence prevention workers. Experienced practitioners at the launch talked about how the huge loss in federal funding for community-based violence prevention work is making current and future work here even more precarious. And that less data describing their approach and success adds to the precarity. Philadelphia City Council, and the Mayor, are committed to the work, but what if we had a platform like Propel to gather the learning from all sources, including directly from community workers, so that it was available to all new trainees, to everyone in the city who needs it, and to other cities who want to learn from Philadelphia’s successes.

But maybe this is already happening! Does anyone know if it is? Let me know if you’d like to be connected to Sarah and her team too!