One Page Summary

Amsterdam is facing challenges on all levels of the SDGs. Currently, we are not using the full potential of bottom-up initiatives to solve the challenges faced in our city. What if we embrace the local heroes and facilitate seamless movement building for change makers in Amsterdam?

With Heroes & Friends we built the best platform to engage new people in a social movement by using social media and friendship. People can support social movements on Heroes & Friends with money, goods, as a volunteer or with a network of friends by becoming an ambassador. Ambassadors share support requests and informative messages to their friends as a gift to the social movement and this generates a really high engagement around the cause.

We select 17 Amsterdam-based social movements, one on each SDG, and design a support campaign. We will encourage and support the 17 initiatives in finding 100 ambassadors who share support requests and informative messages on social media or messenger services to their friends. Through the people sharing the messages every initiative will reach at least 40.000 people and combined it is a reach of 600.000 friends directly. In this group of, probably mostly Amsterdammers, they can expect to find the volunteers, goods and money they need to drive their social movement forward. The 17 SDG Heroes have to be based in Amsterdam and most of their impact has to be in Amsterdam as well. Since Heroes & Friends is free to use, the SDG Heroes can use the platform for as long as they need. In addition, Heroes & Friends will sponsor Premium features for this project.

However, not all Amsterdammers can or will participate in these 17 social movements in particular, and that’s why we designed a program for increasing engagement for the long-term on the SDGs in Amsterdam where everyone can participate at one point. We make a Virtual Reality documentary about the best change makers of our city. They are the SDG Heroes of our city that we want to highlight because they are an example for the rest of us. With the VR documentary we will host at least 17 screenings in public parks and other places throughout the city. This way we want to inspire people from Osdorp about the change makers in Noord and the other way around. By bringing people together around a rather new concept (VR) in public places we will also design conversations around the SDGs with the goal that people start to take action by becoming a hero or friend themselves.

Most of the impact will therefore be created when the 17 SDG Heroes are inspiring others to start and built campaigns for social movements. By showing how it can be done, and engaging thousands of people, we are certain more Amsterdammers will start their own campaigns and become our new SDG Heroes. If the momentum is built we expect this cycle to increase over time with potentially every Amsterdammer receiving support requests in their social media or messenger services. By then we have really unleashed the potential of bottom-up social movements in Amsterdam.

All of the original 17 SDG Heroes projects are aggregated and visualised at a special page designed for it. If new SDG Heroes emerge in the process we can add them and showcase the bottom-up change makers of Amsterdam, their support requests, and their stories in one overview.