We caught up with Katherine Weatherburn, the founder of Safetyknot, to find out more about the organisation, why they’re passionate about their mission, and the impact of social organisations in today’s world.
What is the vision of Safetyknot?
Safetyknot’s vision is that we have a safer world and higher levels of safety in low income and developing countries. In particular, fewer unintentional injuries and deaths such as those arising from road traffic collisions, cuts, burns, bites, poisoning and drowning.
Our mission is to provide culturally and contextually appropriate and accessible training and safety resources to people who need them most. We aspire for a safer world with less injuries.
What work does Safetyknot engage in?
Safetyknot aims to teach people about how their actions and behaviours can make a difference to how safe a situation is. A large part of the training work involves conducting research to better understand what injuries are occurring, why they are occurring and how they can be avoided.
Safetyknot acts as an almost invisible hand, correcting individuals’ lives in as seamless and unobtrusive manner as possible, avoiding the devastating social and economic impact of injuries.
The difficulty of working with communities in low-income countries that have limited, or no literacy skills is making training culturally and contextually appropriate. Everything we do, we try and make sure that it is appropriate for the people who are participating.
What are the origins of Safetyknot?
Safetyknot began as an NGO in Nepal and is now a registered company in the UK. Working in the international development sector in Asia, as the founder of Safetyknot, I saw that people’s lives were being destroyed and devastated by injuries that could have been prevented. I noticed a discerning gap where there appeared to be aftercare support for those who were injured, but no attention was being placed on preventing these injuries in the first place.
Hence, Safety Knot was created to help people make practical low-cost changes to the way they live to promote safety and prevent injury.
What does it mean to be a purpose driven business?
Every time someone purchases safety support from Safetyknot, we give back to Nepal by providing free training or safety resources to families or organisations in need of safety support.
A purposeful business is not just about profit, it is about people and how we can actually replace profit with people. That ethos is at the forefront of a purpose driven business.
How important is community to Safetyknot?
Community is something that is extremely important to Safetyknot. We want to grow a ‘Safetyknot family’, so that we are a global family but also with strong community ties in individual countries.
How was the business impacted by the pandemic?
The pandemic has made us realise that a business model which is entirely based on face-to-face activities is a short-sighted one. As such, we are now in the process of trying to bring years of experience and knowledge into online platforms so that it can be more easily shared with people.
What is your plan for the future?
Currently Safetyknot is based in Asia, but in the future we hope to expand to countries outside of Asia that suffer from high rates of avoidable injuries, such as those in South America and Africa.
We are also looking at developing a Safetyknot app which once downloaded would work offline. It would be centred around photos and stories that are relevant to different practices such as cooking or farming.
What support have you received through the eScalate programme and how has it helped your organisation develop?
The eScalate programme has helped expose and connect the Safetyknot business to other like-minded people and organisations. Expanding our network has developed the capacity and number of people working with Safetyknot.
Our thanks to University of Oxford student, Kush Patel for collecting and writing this case study for OSEP.