A Voice For the Voiceless
The Advocacy Project helps marginalized communities to tell their story, claim their rights and produce social change. Since 1998, AP has supported 117 community-based organizations in 52 countries.
Read more about AP partners who have produced social change.
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Our Model of Support
The Advocacy Project model of support for community-based advocacy has eleven components:
- Connect to a disempowered community: AP connects with a community that has suffered widespread discrimination and is barred from claiming its rights. AP does not initiate this contact, but responds to inquiries or referrals. Priority is given to communities that are friendless and have the potential to trigger social change.
- Develop a partnership with a representative from the disempowered community: AP’s partners should be committed to human rights and advocacy and emerge directly from the community. This gives them motivation, and ensures that their campaigns will be sustained.
- Volunteers: AP recruits graduate students in North America and Europe to work with partners for periods of up to a year. Most Fellows are deployed for three months, and play a key role in supporting partners, as described in this report.
- Set clear goals: AP helps partners to set campaigning goals and identify desired outcomes within a time-frame.
- Tell the story: AP Peace Fellows (volunteers) and staff produce a compelling portrait of the partner’s disempowerment and advocacy. This provides content for web pages and bulletins – and for advocacy.
- Disseminate information: AP disseminates information through an online news service (AdvocacyNet) and website. All partners are given a page on the AP site.
- Produce information: AP helps partners to produce their own information, on a regular and sustained basis through newsletters, press releases and reports.
- Use ICT: AP helps partners to develop ICT tools (wiki pages, websites), develop ICT skills, and use ICT in their advocacy.
- International Outreach: AP helps partners to win support for their campaigns among universities, schools, diaspora communities and community groups in North America and Europe.
- Fundraising: AP helps to raise funds for partners, through direct and indirect fundraising.
- Sustaining campaigns: AP helps partners to sustain their advocacy until their goals are met, by recruiting Fellows year after year, raising funds, and working with others that can complement AP’s own program.