Scaling Impact at a Grassroots Level: An Interview with Vedanshi Vala
In today’s rapidly evolving nonprofit landscape, scaling impact while staying true to grassroots origins is no small feat. In this exclusive interview, we sit down with Vedanshi Vala, Co-Founder, Chairperson, and Executive Director of BOLT Safety Society—a youth-founded, federally-registered not-for-profit that’s dedicated to building safer, more equitable communities. BOLT Safety tackles violence, harassment, and abuse through a range of community-driven programs, all unified on a digital platform. Vedanshi shares her insights on navigating the complexities of grassroots leadership, growing impact, and empowering communities from the ground up.
Q: Can you share the story behind founding BOLT Safety Society? What motivated you to create a youth-founded organization focused on ending violence, harassment, and abuse?
A: Globally, 1 in 3 women experience some form of sexual violence in their lifetimes, per UN Women. In BC, where I’m from, the statistic reported by the Ending Violence Association of BC is 1 in 6 women. It is a disappointing reality of our modernizing world that we are unable to, collectively as a society, uphold the rights and dignity of all people. As our society continues to evolve, with rapidly advancing technologies and novel scientific discoveries, what is truly the point of it all if people still can’t walk down the street without looking over their shoulders in fear? As young people, we bring a passion to see the status quo chance, and we have the fresh energy needed to change it. I truly believe in the power of intergenerational work, and that absolutely means bringing youth to the table, especially when these issues affect us and our rights as well.
The story of founding BOLT Safety Society is a bit of a long one, full of ups and downs. It started with entering the Anu and Naveen Jain Women’s Safety XPRIZE when I was in Grade 10, along with some of our co-founders. We made the pivot into the non-profit sector after developing a Digital Platform several years later, providing centralized access to a database of survivor-centric resources. This includes video safety tutorials from martial arts experts, to listed hotlines and crisis services, to step-by-step explanations of the forensic sexual assault examination process. Our platform also includes educational articles that aim to flip victim-blaming narratives and shatter the stigma around discussing these issues, with an objective to foster cultures of consent. Since then, our ‘tech startup meets non-profit’ has built and scaled several projects, including a Safe Hubs network spanning across 48 locations and 16 communities in Canada, a Safe Buddies program that operated a national hotline, and a workshop program which has been delivered to global audiences in Kenya and India. We’re now neck-deep in producing a global documentary that investigates issues of violence from different parts of the world.
Q: What were some of the initial challenges you faced in trying to scale your impact, and how did you overcome them?
A: Moneyyyyyy. I’m not joking. Starting with virtually no external funding and resources, our team had a steep hill to climb. We remain very grateful for the first few people who donated to our organization, supported our fundraising efforts, and provided us with some of our first microgrants. It was those baby steps that catapulted our capacity to scale up our work, because you have to reach the bottom of the mountain before you can take a hike upwards. Nonetheless, I am grateful for that time of our journey, as it taught us to make our dollar stretch further by being resourceful and creative. Even though we’ve since built up greater financial health and taken on large-scale projects (from a financial standpoint), those initial days ingrained within us a deep sense of fiduciary responsibility which continues to guide and inform our strategic decisions.
Q: Scaling a grassroots initiative is challenging. How has BOLT Safety Society managed to expand its reach while staying true to its original mission and values? What advice would you give to grassroots organizations looking to scale their impact without compromising their mission or core values?
A: We revisit our core values periodically to ensure that the projects we are taking on still meet our original mandate to build more safe and equitable communities. I have found that building clear and specific communications around your mission and vision helps the team identify priorities. For instance, our pillars of focus primarily center around three areas of work: prevention, response, and awareness / advocacy. Some of our programs focus on the prevention of sexual violence, yet others are on the frontlines of responding to crisis, and we’re also highly intentional about our media and public relations engagements under the advocacy pillar. For instance, attending the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women was an important move for our organization to make, as we situated ourselves within a forum that convenes stakeholders from around the world, bringing our novel approaches to a diverse audience, and also learning much about other approaches to impact.
Q: What specific strategies have you used to replicate and scale BOLT Safety’s programs across different communities, and how have you maintained their effectiveness at a larger scale? As you’ve expanded, have there been any challenges in adapting your grassroots model to different communities or contexts? How do you manage this scalability?
A: I’ll provide the example of how we scaled our Safe Hubs program into Ontario (it started locally in BC). We received grant funding from Latincouver’s Social Impact Grant for Youth, which made it possible for me to travel to Ottawa and Toronto with our then-Safe Hubs Manager, Emily (who is now part of our Executive Office as our Public Relations Director). We met up with Dominic and Ananya, two of our then-Programs Assistants (they’ve both been promoted to management roles recently as well, we have some all-stars on the team). Emily and I provided them with in-person training on approaching prospective businesses to join the Safe Hubs network, and we mentored them during our time in Ontario until they had grown in their confidence and abilities to represent BOLT Safety Society’s agenda well. Even after Emily and I returned back to BC, we left knowing that our on-ground team had built the capacity to carry our work onwards (and in fact, they did indeed manage to secure more partnerships afterwards). So in response to this question, scaling up means you’re spending more time in things like training, setting-up local capacity, and disseminating knowledge. You also need to be prepared to spend a lot more time coordinating with team members across timezones, and modify your approach as required to meet the ‘vibes’ of the local community, while retaining your core and essential values. This also means doing research and speaking with locals, instead of assuming you will know what is best for that new community.
Q: Digital platforms are powerful tools for scalability. How has BOLT Safety leveraged its digital platform to enhance outreach and scale impact at a grassroots level? Building partnerships is often crucial for scaling grassroots initiatives. How has collaboration with other organizations helped you expand BOLT Safety’s reach and influence?
A: Our Digital Platform leverages the dual power of both technology and more traditional human-human partnerships to drive impact.
One of the things we’re currently working on is featuring short video interviews with representatives of different organizations that support survivors of sexual violence, where they explain the services they offer, and some also do walk-throughs so a potential client can visualize what to expect. Kind of like those videos hospitals do on ‘what to expect on the day of your surgery’, but for mental health services and crisis response options for survivors of traumatic events like violence and abuse. These partnerships both bolster the visibility of interviewed organizations, and also provide them with an incentive to promote BOLT Safety’s Digital Platform: so it’s a win-win for both organizations, in terms of PR goals.
At the same time, the beautiful thing about technology is that it can help you scale up your impact and reach people well outside of your local networks and communities. We know our Digital Platform can serve people in different parts of the country, and even the world, with our international resource section. Were we to manually go on tour across the country, it would take us longer to reach the same geographies. Nonetheless, technology comes with its drawbacks when it comes to vulnerable groups who may not even have access to the internet or a smartphone to access our Digital Platform. This is also why we aren’t entirely dependent on our Digital Platform to deliver our programming, and why we introduced our Project LyghtNyng workshop program so we can bring our database of knowledge offline.
Remember: you need to design to include as many people as possible, and leave no one behind who may need you.
Q: What are some key indicators or metrics you track to measure the success of scaling efforts within BOLT Safety’s grassroots programs?
A: As last reported on our website, we have had an estimated impact on over 27,600+ people globally, a number which is calculated based on the number of volunteers, workshop attendees, resource accesses from The Hub, reach through Safe Buddies event coverage, Safe Hubs map accesses, unique website visitors, social media and website followers / members. A separate metric we report is that we’ve had over 1.9 million impressions, which is a sum of our website, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube views. We’re quite careful to report these two figures separately, and we believe it is good practice to do so as well, especially in a sector where there tends to be inflation and ambiguity in defining impact. We also track the amount of grant funding we’ve received and awards we’ve won, as we believe it indicates the financial responsibility our organization has held, and the scale at which we’ve executed projects. Our leadership has been recognized at the regional and national levels by L'Oréal Paris, BCBusiness, Novartis, Google, the Surrey Board of Trade, the VGH and UBC Hospital Foundation, and Canadian Immigrant Magazine, among others. We’re grateful to have achieved these milestones, and know we have much further to go, still.
Q: Looking toward the future, what is your vision for scaling BOLT Safety’s impact even further, and how do you plan to achieve it while maintaining a grassroots approach?
A: In the greatest of ironies, our organization shouldn’t have to exist. Sexual violence should not be occuring. People should be feeling safe in their homes, not facing the recurrent trauma of domestic abuse. Women should be able to walk freely at 3 a.m. down the street because they felt like grabbing a late-night ice cream, not wondering if some stranger would attack or stalk them. Since that isn’t reality, we’d like to do our part in making it so. We’d like to help build a world with the right educational opportunities to foster consent, the appropriate infrastructure and response mechanisms to respond to violence swiftly, and we’d like to help ensure perpetrators face justice. Through meaningful partnerships, I’m confident we can make great progress in our lifetimes. We stand on the shoulders of giants, and I want to end this by thanking everyone who has come before us and done the work which makes it possible for us to build upon their impact.