I am Nancy Pearson, the New Tactics in Human Rights Training Manager. My role in the program shifted from Program Manager (2006 - 2011) back to training manager in 2012. This provided me with a great opportunity to focus on our training program and materials. Please see the fruits of MANY creative minds and human rights activists, and their advocacy experiences, that have yielded our New Tactics Stategic Effectiveness Method and our Strategy Toolkit.

I have been an activist for more than 30 years and a social worker by profession. I've been at the Center for Victims of Torture for 21 years. I began at the Center in 1999 by providing direct social work services to survivors of torture and as a trainer in a wide variety of the Center's training programs for education, capacity building and advocacy. These experiences have impressed upon me the cost human rights advocacy can have on a person, their family and their community; but also the incredible resiliency of the human spirit.

As a social worker, I had worked with marginalized communities in different capacities but I had not identified myself as a human rights activists. I first began to define myself as a human rights activist back in 1984. I went to the Philippines to document human rights violations taking place under the Marcos Dictatorship. The experience was so profound that I eventually decided to go live and work in the Philippines. I remained in the Philippines for eight years from 1991 to 1998. Prior to that experience, although as a social worker I was interested in individual and social change, I had not thought about how that conscious development of change could be viewed from a human rights perspective and framework. Since that time, my perspective on human rights has grown and developed to recognize the many movements "human rights" embraces - such as women, children, the environment, health, trade, as well as the torture treatment and restorative justice movements. No matter what our walk of life, we have the opportunity to ground ourselves in that human rights perspective and engage in our communities to create a better world for us all.