Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) Selected as TED 2020 Audacious Project, Announces Partnership With KITE

NEW YORK, Aug. 25, 2020 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) has been named among the 2020 grant recipients of The Audacious Project, an initiative of TED.

The Audacious Project is a collaborative funding initiative that's catalyzing social impact on a grand scale. Housed at TED, the nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. The Audacious Project convenes funders and social entrepreneurs with the goal of supporting bold solutions to the world's most urgent challenges. The funding collective is made up of respected organizations and individuals in philanthropy.

Executive Director of HOT, Tyler Radford, has marked this juncture in the organization's growth as an important moment to invest in the concept of team leadership:

"We're here in service of the entire humanitarian community and as we grow we recognize that our leadership team needs to be operating at peak effectiveness for us to be of service."

KITE is a global consulting firm that was created to support leaders and leadership teams in the humanitarian and development space. Its practice is deeply grounded in a large body of scholarship on teams and organizational effectiveness, now seeing growing interest in application in the development and philanthropic sectors.

Organizations are explicitly seeking ways to improve not only efficiency and impact, but also to drive better results while being more explicit and attentive to the well-being of their members, and more mindful of how they consult with one another to become more effective over time.

Nina Segal and Jason Ighani, founders of KITE, are leadership development practitioners with extensive experience in the United Nations System and other global organizations. Over the past several years, they have come to believe that a specific focus on teams is critical in order to meet large and recurring humanitarian challenges.

"We have tremendous admiration and respect for HOT's mission, and feel privileged to partner with their talented executive team," said Segal. "Our hope, as we deepen our work together, is to help unleash an even greater capacity for the collective synergy and 'push' that The Audacious Project demands."

Together, the two organizations have begun to address the dynamics involved in the design and launch of HOT's management team that maximizes existing strengths while deepening dialogue and awareness around the conditions needed for ever increasing agility and impact.

Given the goal of The Audacious Project to enable social entrepreneurs and nonprofit leaders to take on the world's most urgent challenges, HOT's work is now set to map an area that is home to one billion people in 94 countries over the next five years. The partnership with KITE is a critical direction in humanitarian work, focusing not just on the problems themselves, but also on the people who are leading the sector and doing the work.

"We envision HOT being one of the places people talk about when they think about tech nonprofits and best places to work in a global digital economy. And for that reason we're investing in training for our staff and leadership team," said Radford.

For humanitarian work in general, the goal is to achieve persistent design of teams and team-focused approaches to increase the effectiveness of leadership and establish the institutional norms that, in turn, create the large-scale change that tends to be both frequently spoken of but also elusive.

About HOT
HOT is an international team dedicated to humanitarian action and community development through open mapping. We work together to provide map data that revolutionizes disaster management, reduces risks, and contributes to achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.

About KITE
KITE is a global consulting firm specialized in supporting leaders and leadership teams within the humanitarian and development space.

SOURCE Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team