Hello all!
Thank you so much for joining this conversation about measuring success of advocacy work. My name is Kirsten Anderson and I will be facilitating the conversation about Measuring Success of Advocacy Initiatives this week.
You were invited to participate because you are funding human rights advocacy work in the global south.
We will be creating a guide for activists and funders interested in measuring the progress of their advocacy work as part of a grant from DRL (US Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor). We are hoping that you will share your experiences with us to help us create this.
Specifically in this conversation we will be looking for your stories about how you and advocates you work with measure success in the advocacy you fund.
We will be putting together three case examples from these conversations and sharing them with DRL as well as participants in these conversations.
We understand that many organizations and activists are doing things to measure the progress or impacts of their work, even if they do not officially call it evaluation. We are interested in those stories as well.
Every day this week (Monday through Friday) I ask that you check in twice to answer the question of the day, AND to comment on further questions and answers posed by participants and the facilitator during the course of the day. Feel free to do that in whatever order makes sense and when it fits in your schedule. I will have the question for the next day posted by 7pm CST (Minnesota, USA time) the night before.
This conversation is not promoted or linked to by any page on the New Tactics website. The link provided is the only way to access this group.
Please feel free to ask any questions about this process in a comment here or by emailing me (email address below).
I am looking forward to all of us learning from each other!
Kirsten Anderson, MA Program Evaluation Advisor The Center for Victims of Torture
Hello all, today could you:
1. Briefly introduce yourself by name and the type of work you do
2. Tell us about a piece of advocacy work you are particularly proud of being involved with?
Hello all, this is Jackie. My role as Chief Learning and Evaluation Officer covers facilitation of strategy development and its evaluation, supporting grantee evaluation and coordinating our internal organizational learning. About 12 years ago when I was at The Atlantic Philanthropies, I helped lead an effort with Annie Casey, California Endowment and others to strengthen the field of advocacy and policy change evaluation. One result was the establishment of the Center for Evaluation Innovation. I do not think I can attach documents but I think I attached cover photos of four resources we supported that I particular like.
Hello Jackie, thanks for sharing! We have come accross resources from the Center for Evaluation Innovation in our own research at CVT for this project. This is such a value add to the field.
Was not involved in developing but they seem to be gaining some traction:
http://www.advocacyaccelerator.org/
Agreed! These are fantastic resources that we use at AJWS.
Hi all,
I'm the Vice President for Programs at the Fund for Global Human Rights, a grant-making organization that moves financial and technical resources to locally-rooted human rights groups in 20 countries around the world.
An example of advocacy work that the Fund has been supporting is an ongoing campaign in the Philippines for national non-discrimination legislation inclusive of sexual orientation and gender identity and expression. We've been resourcing this campaign both by funding individual LGBTI organizations to mobilize their constituencies and also by funding a coalition that is coordinating advocacy and lobbying efforts. This campaign is ongoing, and has been for a number (almost 15!!) of years; we hope this is the year the bill will pass.
But despite the long delay in seeing the legislation actually approved, I already see the campaign as something of a success. To build momentum, rights groups have successfully pressed for the enactment of local and municipal non-discrimination ordinances that provide similar protections at a local level to what would be achieved through national legislation. Groups also have been expanding and activating their grassroots constituencies, which has benefits that go well beyond this particular advocacy campaign. And this policy goal has provided a focus for solidarity and coordination among LGBTI, women's rights and human rights groups and activists.
Look forward to discussing more with the group this week.
All best,
David Mattingly
Hi all,
I'm the Vice President for Programs at the Fund for Global Human Rights, a grant-making organization that moves financial and technical resources to locally-rooted human rights groups in 20 countries around the world.
An example of advocacy work that the Fund has been supporting is an ongoing campaign in the Philippines for national non-discrimination legislation inclusive of sexual orientation and gender identity and expression. We've been resourcing this campaign both by funding individual LGBTI organizations to mobilize their constituencies and also by funding a coalition that is coordinating advocacy and lobbying efforts. This campaign is ongoing, and has been for a number (almost 15!!) of years; we hope this is the year the bill will pass.
But despite the long delay in seeing the legislation actually approved, I already see the campaign as something of a success. To build momentum, rights groups have successfully pressed for the enactment of local and municipal non-discrimination ordinances that provide similar protections at a local level to what would be achieved through national legislation. Groups also have been expanding and activating their grassroots constituencies, which has benefits that go well beyond this particular advocacy campaign. And this policy goal has provided a focus for solidarity and coordination among LGBTI, women's rights and human rights groups and activists.
Look forward to discussing more with the group this week.
All best,
David Mattingly
Thanks David! It is great to hear about the ways you have seen so many successes in this work! At CVT we have had many discussions about the many outcomes from advocacy work that are broader than policy change. I love the way you framed those successes.
I would love to hear an example of another benefit you've seen from "expanding and activating their grassroots constituencies."
I am also looking forward to further discussion this week.
Hi Kirsten,
There has been some fascinating intersectional work around the anti-discrimination policy push that has expanded constituencies for the policy and LGBTI rights in general. For example, organizations of lesbians who live in marginalized, urban poor communities in metro Manila have organized their communities to resist forced displacement to make way for luxury housing developments. This work has demonstrated their commitment to their communities, which in turn has helped other communitiy members be more supportive of their LGBTI neighbors and express solidarity in the form of support for the anti-discrimination legislation. At the same time, this work in marginalized communities has helped bridge the cultural and class divide between low income LGBTI people and LGBTI rights activists, who tend to come from more privileged backgrounds.
Thank you David for that example. I commented on Soheila's comment that it seems you are both seeing increased solidarity in some unlikely alliances. It is so encouraging to hear these more relational outcomes!
This is an interesting example, which resonates with what we have experienced in Brazil: a divide between the more established, well-resourced, often "elite" organizations, and Afro-Brazilian groups, typically under-resourced and less visible, directly connected with communities affected by the worst violations. We have recently made a conscious effort to shift resources to black-led community organizations, helping them build their capacity and elevate their voice. The divide and mistrust is still there and I suppose it will take much more to create meaningful solidarity and links between the movements.
Hello Everyone,
My name is Irit Houvras and I am the Director of Strategic Learning, Research and Evaluation at American Jewish World Service (AJWS) where I am developing and implementing systems to learn from, monitor and evaluate our human rights grantmaking. I’ve been at AJWS for 3.5 years and have largely focused on internal systems development and implementation. AJWS supports ~450 grantees in 19 countries – over 90% of which engage in human rights advocacy on issues related to civil and political rights, sexual health and rights, and land, water and climate justice. Two years ago I formed an internal advocacy working group to design and lead a mapping of our grantees legislative and policy goals. This mapping was recently launched and will serve to establish a baseline to chart progress towards these advocacy goals over time. While we haven’t completed it yet, I’m really excited to see the data rolling in.
I look forward to this discussion!
Irit
Irit, that mapping process sounds so fascinating! As does your position and the work that AJWS is doing. I also look forward to hearing more about this. How did you go about gathering and consolidating information from all of those grantees on their legislative and policy goals?
Thanks for the question, and the discussion. At AJWS we have in-country staff and consultants. They often come from the movements our grantees are engaged in. They provide grantees with we call 'accompaniment', which includes a broad range of tailored, needs-based support. They know our grantees work well. As part of their work, they also document and report on progress in a narrative form on an annual basis. These staff and consultants along with our Program Officers are providing the information, reaching out to grantees as needed. We developed this tool as a complement to our other reporting, that provides qualitative progress updates on how the movements and communities are coming together and advancing their issues.
That sounds like a great process, with a variety of relevant stakeholders involved in qualitative data collection!
Hello everybody,
Sorry for joining the conversation a bit late in the day! I am Soheila Comninos, a program officer in Open Society's Human Rights Initiative program. I am part of HRI's Justice team, and my role is to give grants and support civil society organizations that uphold the rights of criminal defendants, such as due process rights, the right to be free of ill-treatment and torture, and the right to liberty.
One example of a piece of advocacy I am proud of relates to ongoing work with our partners in Latin America to elevate the voice of communities direclty impacted by incarceration so that they speak for themselves. Over the past few years, we have funded a variety of groups that seek to challenge the over-incarceration of women for drug-related offenses in Colombia, Mexico, Brazil. We have managed to create linkages between women's rights groups, which typically didn't care about drug policy, and drug policy groups, which were not necessarily aware of the disproportionate impact of the war on drugs on women. Increasingly, we are encouraging groups to share their knoweldge and skills with networks of formerly incarcerated women and their families, and help them organize and self-advocate. In some places, there have been a few advocacy wins in terms of the adoption of non-custodial sentences or greater awareness by policy-makers of the plight of women. I think one of the main successes of these efforts has been the creation of a network of civil society organizations that care about these issues and connect from their different perspectives, creating solidarity across rights issues and movements.
Thank you for sharing Soheila! That is such an interesting case, this success sounds somewhat like what David mentioned. Building solidarity between formerly disconnected communities is such an immensely valuable gain in the world today, where increasing division seems to be the norm. Welcome and I look forward to hearing more!
Hi all,
I apologize for joining the group and discussions late. As I'm sure everyone here has experienced, a trip abroad lasted longer than expected. Anyway, I'm back and looking forward to these discussions. My name is Kelly Skeith and I am the Senior Design, Monitoring and Evaluation Specialist for Freedom House. Freedom House is an independent NGO that strives to be a catalyst for freedom, democracy, and rule of law, through analysis, advocacy and action. (E.g: our reports like Freedom in the World, advocacy on the Hill and internationally, and grant based programming). I'm responsible for overseeing all project design, M&E and learning for our 40+ grants around the world.
While this isn't a specific advocacy success, something we are very proud of is our Lifeline: the Embattled CSO Assistance Fund program which provides rapid response advocacy grants to give local CSOs the resources to push back against closures of civic space as they arise. Lifeline advocacy grants are intended to be highly flexible, and support a wide variety of activities, such as: Community Mobilization; Policy and Legal Advocacy; Civil Society Coalition Building; Strategic Litigation; Awareness Raising Campaigns; Advocacy Capacity Building; and Security and Protection Training. Over the last four years we've supported over 200 grants that have allowed small orgs on the ground, who most likely did not have access to other funds, take advantage of a window of opportunity to push back on closing civic space.
Thank you,
Kelly
Thank you for the introduction Kelly! I appreciate the description of that program, what a great program to address a number of different needs. I am curious what kind of evaluation you might have used to look at some of those activities and their outcomes. I am sure there are many intended and outcomes from that kind of support!