A big announcement

By Sahar Massachi

Dear friends, members, and colleagues,

I’m writing with some important personal news. After founding and running Integrity Institute since the depths of the pandemic, I’m moving on to both pursue important projects, and also take a deep breath and relax after the nonstop grind of startup life. I’ve achieved the goal every founder should have: this organization can continue to thrive if I choose to step away. I’m excited and even eager to do so, but as you can imagine, this is bittersweet.

Over three years ago, I started calling up people I trusted to pitch them a crazy idea: we should make a think tank powered by integrity workers. Amazingly enough, they liked the idea and wanted to make it with me. Starting with a small team of about a dozen committed volunteers, we've attracted new members, funding, attention, and impact. We've secured access to, and influence with, people writing public policy around the world, people doing advocacy work, people making decisions in platform companies, academics, and more. We've been wildly successful.

Integrity Institute members have helped shape multiple pieces of EU policy, briefed tons of policymakers in legislative, judicial, executive, and independent agency roles, and are in deep conversation with policymakers and advocates around the world. Companies like Pinterest are changing not just their policies, but their design decisions thanks in part to us. Since we’ve started, we’ve seen an explosion of output, visibility, coordination, and confidence from integrity workers. We’ve seen policymakers become much more educated about how it all works. We’ve built a key institution in the space. And we’ve done it together: members, staff, fellows, founding fellows, partners, donors, community leaders. This has been a true team effort.

Throughout this, we've also grown. More members, more staff, and more ability to fully become what we set out to be at the beginning. Among them: be a champion for integrity workers, protect people around the world, build a stage for members to stand on, and be the sort of place that I dearly wished existed for me back in the day.

I’m proud that we’ve held consistently to a strategic identity -- we're not advocates; we are scientists. We're not partisans for anything other than our members, our oath, and our shared diagnosis of how to fix the internet.

It's been three years of nonstop work, and it’s time for me to go in my own direction. Right now, the most important thing I feel personally called to do is help support US democracy and elections in a way that must be outside Integrity Institute’s methods and positioning.

So! It's time for me to sit back and enjoy this remarkable community we've built – as a member. I’ll also be catching up on my writing, enjoying the ability to meet my neighbors and friends in person, exploring advances in technology I’ve missed these last few years (turns out AI is a thing now!), and being more present offscreen. Plus, of course, meaningfully participating in the US 2024 election cycle.

It's been fun, and it's been an honor. I'll still be around on the Slack, both enjoying the remarkable benefits of II membership and cheering on the staff as they work toward our shared mission.

Please don’t be a stranger. My email is hello@sahar.io. And you can find me on my website (sahar.io) and nascent substack (growth and what comes next), as well as all the sundry social media sites we seem to be on as a matter of course. (My most-used remains Facebook, with Bluesky a clear runner-up). I’d love to stay in touch, and wherever possible be of service to you.

Yours, and forever a champion of our shared integrity Hippocratic oath,

Sahar Massachi

Executive Director and Founder