Celebrating seven years of ALT Advisory: A reflection on scaling a social enterprise
Johannesburg, South Africa – Seven years ago, we set out to create public interest organisations and a new sustainability model. Our mission was simple: we wanted to further the international human rights movement by fostering constitutionalism and protecting and promoting human rights by supporting those who want to change the world. Our mission has not changed but we have.
The early days and the private-public interest law model (PPILM)
ALT Advisory, the initial pillar of our PPILM, was established on 1 July 2017 to provide advisory, research, and training services to civil society organisations and multilateral institutions.
Substantively, ALT Advisory was established to test the collective impact of policy development, law reform, research, and strategic litigation in affecting positive social change in South Africa, and around the African continent. To enter the market, our initial practice areas focused on the triad of “digital rights”: the rights to freedom of expression, privacy, and access to information and knowledge.
Operationally, ALT Advisory was established to generate its own income (provided that income generation did not derogate from our public interest ideals) and remain non-donor reliant to ensure its sustainability. We did this to mitigate competition for civil society resources and to create a “Public Interest Fund” from a portion of our profits to fund strategic and test case litigation in Power & Associates Inc., which was established on 1 July 2018.
This ability to self-fund strategic and test case litigation, in instances where clients are unable to pay, is the central tenet of the PPILM and enables an additional legal service offering to the public where traditional donor-funded public interest law organisations lack capacity or resources.
In setting out on our mission, we did not know where it would take us, but we were resolute in trying to make it work.
Scaling the model
Initially, all we knew and thought was that tireless hard work would get us to where we wanted to go but we soon came to understand that consistent hard work, while necessary, needs to be managed to avoid harm through burnout for the people that deliver our services. We also learned that internal systems need to be thoughtful and fully interrogated to enable growth.
We quickly abandoned the idea of “organic growth” and replaced it with a principle of “intentional development”. We knew our practice areas but we had no idea how to grow an organisation. We focused intently on creating a culture of support and honesty.
With considered and viable systems and strategies (which we still test and iterate consistently), ALT Advisory and Power & Associates have grown from a two-person team into a collective of public interest lawyers, researchers, strategists, communicators, and technologists who work across Africa, and around the world.
As we grew, we intentionally expanded our service offering and developed our culture, ensuring that we stay true to our public interest objectives and ideals. This included expanding our service offerings by introducing ALT Impact, which provides strategy and fundraising support, and ALT Media, which provides communications, website development, and IT support. We also introduced new practices areas, including Equality & Inclusion, Artificial Intelligence, and Climate Justice & Sustainability.
Notably, to better support our clients and partners in the region, enhance our service offering, and develop our regional and international networks we have expanded our operations to Kenya.
We have been fortunate to work with a multiplicity of clients from individuals and activists, civil society organisations and social enterprises across the region, socially-conscious businesses, to agencies and organs in the United Nations and the African Union.
In ALT Advisory, we have now completed over 240 projects in 29 jurisdictions across five continents, and, as a result of the PPILM, in Power & Associates we have offered pro bono legal support in over 30 cases.
We continue to seek enhanced sustainability, to better serve our clients and our partners, to support each other, and to further develop the PPILM. We continue to grow.
It’s about the people
The most important part of growing and scaling our organisations is people.
We remain truly thankful to our clients and partners who believed in us, gave us an opportunity, and who continue to align with us. We could not have done this without you.
We are also thankful to our funders, most notably the Luminate African Team, who have supported our Special Projects and enabled our expansion into Kenya.
Most importantly, we remain immensely thankful to our team (both past and present) for their professionalism, consistency, kindness, and commitment to personal and professional development. They show up every day to pursue our mission and they do so because they care about a better world. They are the heart and soul of what we do.
The future
As we continue to scale for impact, we will continue to develop our service offerings and ensure our sustainability. We will also continue to seek to better understand the impact of our work and our role in protecting and promoting human rights, we will work towards collective ownership of our organisations, and we will continue to support the work of public interest actors who pursue positive social change. We will continue to serve. We will do all of this with compassion and conscience.
Simply, we will continue to work towards protecting and promoting the public interest wherever we may be needed, and we will continue to support those who want to change the world.
With warmth and kindness,
Michael Power, Director, 1 July 2024
