To our Community, Partners, and Friends:

Like many others across our space, CDR has been navigating challenging circumstances for some time now following last year’s funding crisis. As we’ve worked to adapt to a drastically changed landscape, we’ve also reflected seriously and realistically on what the future of CDR could look like in this environment.

Last month, we conducted a comprehensive re-evaluation of our overall situation together with our board, and assessed various scenarios for moving forward. This led us to a difficult but necessary decision:

We will be sunsetting the Center for Digital Resilience, with all programs and activities drawing to a full close on December 31st, 2026.

CDR’s work has always reflected our belief that sustainable digital resilience ecosystems for local communities can’t be built around the ongoing presence of external organizations like ourselves. Bittersweet as it may be, we’re thankful to begin sunsetting on a high note, and are immensely proud of what we’ve accomplished since we first opened shop in 2018.

With our friends at the Guardian Project, we developed the CDR Link Helpdesk, which has become a gold standard in the field for secure incident response operations. With the support of our hosting and deployment partner SR2 Communications, Link is used by 20 organizations worldwide, handling over 1,500 incident response cases since launch. Our Hive incubator program upskilled over 40 new and emerging service providers with advanced-level digital security knowledge and technical expertise, to the benefit of regional communities globally.

And through community resilience programs, such as our Terali project for East and Southeast Asia, we spent over 6 years co-designing systems with regional partners to deliver ongoing digital security assistance to civil society groups in their local communities. CDR worked intentionally with each partner towards full program handover on a mutually agreed exit date; as a result, over 500 high-risk civil society organizations across 15 countries have since received critical support from our partners and the systems we created with them.

As such, CDR was never designed to last forever. Given our approach, we knew that the time to sunset the organization would come eventually, and we plan on carrying out a thoughtful, orderly wind-down that does good by the community. We’re particularly excited to share that the Link Helpdesk is transitioning to a new home with SR2 Communications, who will continue maintaining and improving Link as an open source project for new and existing users alike.

If you have any questions for us, or would like to know more about our sunsetting process, please do not hesitate to reach out at anytime:

• To contact the CDR team: [email protected]
• To contact the SR2 team: [email protected]

Over the past 8 years, we’ve been fortunate to build enduring and impactful partnerships with organizations, providers, and people across the globe, without whom our work simply would not have been possible. We are so deeply appreciative and grateful for the trust and support of these partners, and that of our many friends throughout the wider digital rights community. We only hope that we have given as much back to you as you have given to us.

Onward & upward,

The Center for Digital Resilience