The Tension

Many leaders who give a damn can attract attention. Some even achieve rapid growth. But as founders and their teams build smart solutions, durable brand foundations are often overlooked. Without them, attention fades, participation stalls, and impact remains fragile.

In an environment of noise and brand sameness, visibility is often mistaken for meaning. Trust erodes easily. Without trust, people hesitate to engage. Without sustained participation, organizations become financially and strategically fragile. Fragile brands do not mature into iconic and resilient institutions. Without resilient institutions, systemic change rarely endures.

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Our Core Assumption

Durable impact requires brands that people trust and participate in. A brand endures when it functions as a shared structure that people recognize, identify with, and contribute to over time. Trust enables engagement. Belonging sustains it. Participation strengthens resilience and expands an organization’s capacity to pursue its mission over the long term. When these reinforce one another, a brand becomes a household name built to last.

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Our Leverage Point

Momkai does not claim to change social systems directly. Our leverage lies upstream in strengthening the brand foundations that make sustained action possible. In the noise, we cultivate calm by designing clarity and coherence.

Through identity, narrative, and experience design, we help brands articulate who they are, align expression across the organization, and create coherent pathways for engagement. Brand building becomes infrastructure design, making strategy visible and credible.

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The Mechanism

Clear and coherent brands earn trust more consistently. Trust reduces perceived risk and increases openness to engagement. Reinforced by shared identity, it enables belonging. Belonging shifts relationships from transactional to participatory. Sustained participation strengthens retention, revenue stability, reputational resilience, and strategic focus. It expands an organization’s capacity to pursue its mission over time.

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The Evidence

Our understanding of trust, belonging, and participation is grounded in 24 years of building brands across Europe, North America, Africa, and Japan, as well as in launching and sustaining global platforms ourselves, including two world record-breaking crowdfunding campaigns.

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‍Harald Dunnink, founder of Momkai (2002), co-founded De Correspondent (2013), now the third-largest member-funded news organization in the world after The Guardian and Die Zeit. It has sustained ad-free journalism through direct member support and built a publishing house in which every book has become a bestseller, reflecting the resilience of its member-driven model. Momkai shaped the brand, platform, books, and campaigns from inception and continues to guide its evolution.

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Dunnink also co-founded The School for Moral Ambition (2023), with New York Times best-selling author Rutger Bregman and others, which has grown to 25,000+ members across 140 countries. Its expansion into Berlin, Brussels and New York, including its first University Fellowship at Harvard, illustrates how shared purpose can scale across cultures when designed intentionally. Momkai likewise shaped its brand and platform from inception.

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For 24 years, Momkai has operated in a volatile creative industry. We have sustained long-term client partnerships, built work that entered the national archive, and attracted talent from five continents. The lesson has been consistent: attention is fleeting, belonging endures.

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Intended Impact

We do not promise direct societal impact. By helping brands grow into resilient and iconic institutions, we increase the likelihood that meaningful change efforts endure.

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Discover More

We collaborate with thinkers like Rutger Bregman to design the foundations that turn moral ambition into lasting institutions.