Combining personal resilience training with Impact Engineering to ensure political initiatives achieve traction and resonance within highly polarized environments
The Challenge:
A Hostile Political Climate
Trust in politics is eroding, the gap between people and power is widening. While women are gradually gaining ground in leadership roles, this progress is stalled in regions marked by extremism and heavy polarisation. In regions like Saxony and Thuringia, women politicians face unique pressures where their initiatives are frequently buried by toxic narratives, populist simplifications and a hostile climate. Existing support programmes often focus solely on helping women get into office, leaving the critical gap to address how these leaders can ensure their ideas survive and achieve impact within fragmented public spaces after the election
The Solution:
A Pilot Project for Resilience and Effectiveness
The Women Political Impact Lab (WPIL) is a Pilot Project, which provides targeted support for a selected group of women politicians in Saxony and Thuringia to move beyond symbolic representation and achieve concrete results. Using Impact Engineering methodology, the Impact Lab operates through two interlinked work streams:
Strategic Impact & Traction (Technical Focus): We conduct Impact Clinics and Narrative Stress-Tests to audit policy proposals for bottlenecks and reframe initiatives so they resonate beyond polarised bubbles.
Resilience & Support (Soft Skills Focus): We build political safe spaces and Mentorship Circles to address the personal and psychological burdens of operating in hostile environments. By the end of the 12-month journey, participants are equipped with "Impact Dossiers" and refined messaging that bypasses polarisation to connect with skeptical or hard-to-reach communities.
The Project Partner
The WPIL is a pilot project funded by the Better Politics Foundation (BPF), the first global fund dedicated to supporting non-partisan political leadership innovation. BPF operates on the theory of change that transforming political leadership and the conditions that enable it. By backing bold and innovative ideas like the WPIL, BPF supports political changemakers from the initial spark of an idea to scaled solutions embedded in political systems.
