Viz for Social Good and Fondation Follerau Luxembourg

4 min readFeb 22, 2021

In January 2021, Viz for Social Good launched our first French/English bilingual project in collaboration with Fondation Follereau Luxembourg. With this new approach we hope to reach even more non-profit organizations that operate and collect data in languages other than English, offering the possibility to our volunteers to choose the language of the visualization. And for this first project, we have had no less than 36 participants from 12 countries!

Fondation Follereau Luxembourg (FFL) (https://ffl.lu/) is a Luxembourg-based NGO committed to the promotion of the quality of life of the most vulnerable African communities. Alongside its trusted partners, FFL supports local, inclusive, and positive initiatives by responding to the needs of local teams in terms of health, education, protection and emergency. The Foundation has evolved since its inception in 1966, initially focussing on the fight against social exclusion from communities for those with leprosy, and over the years, extending its focus to strengthening local resources and infrastructure, as well as raising awareness for collective challenges in Africa.

In our online event with the Foundation on February 12th, it was fantastic to see the result of the volunteers’ work, where we presented and explored a wide range of data visualizations. These were created using different tools, with quite different approaches, using original designs, featuring interactive and static visualizations, focusing on one or several problems, telling powerful stories; but all of them helping to share the impact of the organization’s work.

The participation of Lara Beauguerlange from FFL during the event was especially enriching for us, helping us to understand which components of the visualizations made particular sense and were most important to the Foundation. Her gratitude and excitement about the results created a particularly warm atmosphere among the participants and we are incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to collaborate with her and the FFL.

You can find all the submissions to this and other projects in this submission tracker: (https://public.tableau.com/profile/fredfery#!/vizhome/VizForSocialGood-AllSubmissionssince2017/VizForSocialGood-Submissionssince2017).

The event was recorded here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NprCBaR_ryc) check this out to hear all about Viz For Social Good, to meet some of our team, and eleven of our volunteers: Adam Schroeder, Frances Okolo, Noel Joe Basil, Damiana Pacheco, A.V. Sai Prakash, Sole Molinete, Abhinav Kumar, Maria Grandury, Ana Maria Ewert, Alison Pitt and Kathy Chan.

Viz for Social Good is a place to exchange, to try new things in data visualization, to learn, and to share your work with great organizations. For this project we received many submissions from first-time volunteers, even some for whom this was their first experience in data visualization. Some first-time volunteers were even among those short-listed below, so we want to take the opportunity to applaud all these new participants, and to encourage everyone to participate, regardless of previous experience and to share the results with us!

And the 3 winning visualizations were….

Frances Okolo