Innovation & Impact Award: Recognizing that Digital Resilience Matters
Last week, The SecDev Foundation received the 2025 organizational Innovation and Impact Award in honour of Lewis Perinbam, co-presented by Cooperation Canada and World University Service of Canada (WUSC).
This year’s awards focus on “bold, creative approaches that protect civic space and enable international cooperation.” We’re grateful to be recognized by our peers, and for the visibility this brings to the need for digital resilience among at-risk communities.
We work in a diversity of places, including those shaped by conflict, fragility, and authoritarian closure. So this honour belongs to our staff and to our field teams and local partners who keep showing up in tough conditions to strengthen safety and participation.
Why this matters
Digital technologies create extraordinary opportunities for people to connect, organize, learn, and participate in public life. But the same spaces that empower people can also be used to surveil, intimidate, harass, and silence them. For journalists, activists, women leaders, human rights defenders and civil society organizations, threats that begin online can have very real consequences—disrupting work, weakening networks and shrinking civic space.
That’s why digital resilience matters. It means helping people and organizations reduce their risk, recover faster when things go wrong, and keep doing the work that matters—safely. We start with the digital realities communities face: the tools they rely on, the threats they encounter, and what they are trying to achieve. From there, we co-create solutions that help people communicate, organize and participate with greater safety and confidence.
Our approach is deliberately local. We work with local partners to adapt tools and knowledge to the social and technological realities of their communities. And we invest in people, mentoring local champions who can continue supporting their communities long after any particular initiative ends. This emphasis on local ownership and lasting capacity was among the strengths that the Lewis Perinbam Award jury recognized.
In Syria, the frontline SalamaTech team helps civil society actors and other at-risk communities stay safe online. CyberSTAR has helped more than 100 at-risk civil society groups across Eurasia transform their digital security. In Vietnam, Cambodia and Myanmar, our SEA Changemakers partners have fostered a new generation of digital rights champions. And across the MENA region, Salam@ has built an extended community of practitioners and researchers tackling digital violence against women and girls.
Different places, different solutions—but the same underlying goal: leaving communities better able to protect themselves, participate in public life, and make their voices heard.
About the awards
Since 2020, the Innovation & Impact Awards have recognized individuals and organizations making lasting contributions to international cooperation. The awards are co-presented by Cooperation Canada and World University Service of Canada (WUSC), in collaboration with the trustees of the Lewis Perinbam Award.
For 2025, the awards focused on Canadian individuals and civil society organizations leading “bold, innovative work to protect civic space.” SecDev received the organizational award for its work building digital resilience with communities around the world. We’re grateful to Cooperation Canada, WUSC, and the trustees of the Lewis Perinbam Award for this honour.
Congratulations to Dr. Lauryn Oates (Right to Learn Afghanistan), who received this year’s individual Innovation and Impact award for her work defending access to education for Afghan women and girls. At the same ceremony, Frédérique Chabot (Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights) received Cooperation Canada’s Karen Takacs Award for her advocacy for the rights of women, girls, and gender-diverse people.
Cooperation Canada is a national umbrella organization that convenes and supports Canada’s international development and humanitarian community. WUSC is a Canadian non-profit organization working to improve education and economic opportunities for young people.
Watch the award presentation:
SecDev Foundation Executive Director Deirdre Collings accepts the 2025 Innovation and Impact Award. With an introduction from the chair of the selection committee, Musu Taylor-Lewis (Food for the Hungry Canada).
