Red Aliados: Designing a Regional Framework for Collective Impact

Client: Red Aliados

Scope: Strategic and relational design (design process only)

Region: Latin America

Year: 2023Latin America | 2023

The challenge

How can a diverse group of social organizations and companies across Latin America collaborate in a meaningful way to generate collective impact around water, recycling, and economic empowerment?

The challenge was not technical. It was relational.

Despite strong capacities and shared intentions, the network struggled with fragmentation, limited alignment, and unspoken power dynamics. These relational gaps translated into low-impact management and constrained the network’s potential for real systemic transformation.

Design

This project focused exclusively on process design.

The core intention was to create the conditions for genuine co-creation across the region. A space where dialogue, listening, openness, and collective awareness could unfold. Rather than rushing toward solutions, the design allowed underlying tensions and relational patterns to surface, acknowledging how deeply they shape collaboration and impact.

The work addressed a simple but often avoided question: how do our ways of relating limit or enable collective transformation?

Approach

The process includes participatory research and relational design through:

• Strategic conversations and interviews with key regional actors

• Collective mapping of initiatives, relationships, and areas of action

• Participatory sessions to define shared principles, intentions, and success criteria

• Design of a participation and governance model adapted to cultural and organizational diversity

  
  

The focus was not on producing fixed solutions, but on designing a relational architecture capable of sustaining trust, learning, and collaboration over time.

Expected outcomes

• A shared strategic framework for regional collaboration

• A clear participation and relationship model, clarifying roles and decision-making spaces

• A co-creation strategy that enables intentional collective action

• Success criteria and metrics integrating both impact and relational quality

• Foundations for a more distributed and resilient form of governance

  
  

Why this matters

Collective impact efforts often fail not because of a lack of resources, but because relational dynamics are left unexamined.

This design recognizes that systemic change begins with how we listen, relate, and choose to work together, and that meaningful impact requires the courage to address those dimensions explicitly.