Around the close of 2017, quite a few changes were made at The Broker—changes that left us feeling hopeful about our future. Our choices in 2017, our results in 2017 and our hopes for the future have now been published in our 2017 annual report.
In 2017, The Broker reconfirmed its mission to contribute to more inclusive global development policies, primarily through our role in the Dutch knowledge platforms for global development. We are proud of the results of the knowledge platforms in which we are directly involved, INCLUDE and the Food & Business knowledge platform, and happy with their expected continuation beyond 2018. Having now been formally recognized as a Public Benefit Organization (ANBI) we are committed to using our co-ownership of these knowledge platforms to contribute to our ideals.
In addition to our involvement with the knowledge platforms and its associated projects, we were happy to also contribute to the ideals we share with organizations like Partos and Woord en Daad in our capacity as knowledge brokers.
The tagline under our logo, ‘connecting worlds of knowledge’, continues to capture The Broker’s vision. Visits to our website are relatively stable at some 90,000 visitors per year.
At the end of 2017, founder and full-time director Frans Bieckmann left The Broker. His role is now shared by existing staff members Remmelt de Weerd (as managing director) and Saskia Hollander (as knowledge management director), with a stronger involvement and commitment from the team as a whole. The board of Stichting International Development Publications, the legal entity behind The Broker, changed almost completely from 2017 to the beginning of 2018. It grew from three to five members, with only one member from the original 2017 board remaining. In addition to these changes, as of May 2018 The Broker has been occupying a new office in The Hague, closer to where Dutch and international development policies are made.
Read more in the full annual report for 2017 (in Dutch) here.