Advocacy & Leadership Center

The Advocacy and Leadership Center offers training, consulting, and mentoring to established and emerging leaders and advocates.

We support a diverse global community of trainers and facilitators with wide-ranging language skills and cultural and topical expertise, and our training materials have been translated into five languages. Our network includes more than 800 Advocacy Fellows from some 60 countries.

Our Approach

Advocacy is a set of hands-on technical skills and practices needed to effectively press for change. It is also the foundation of active citizenship, a process through which ordinary people learn to participate in decision making at all levels. Identifying priorities, crafting a strategy, stepping forward, taking action, and achieving results are critical steps to finding one's voice, making oneself heard, and shaping one's future.

Our experience has shown that when people are empowered with the dignity and confidence to act, a world of possibilities opens up. The Advocacy and Leadership Center is dedicated to unleashing the advocate in each of us.

Tangible Results

• Global Network of Advocates. More than 800 people from around the world have become Advocacy Fellows through our three-week community leadership development curriculum. The Fellows program empowers leaders with the knowledge and skills they need to take a leap forward in their advocacy practice. Participants study and practice applying key advocacy analytical tools to their unique contexts, and connect to other advocates and organizations to join a global network of Advocacy Fellows.
• Policy Reform. In Ukraine, citizens must be nationally registered to receive social services—and to be registered, they must have a home address. With ISC support, the Odessa—based NGO "The Way Home" developed an alternative way to register homeless people to give them access to medical, social, and legal services for the first time, and helped other nonprofits across the country do the same. Building on this momentum, The Way Home submitted a draft law with legal assistance from ISC to the Supreme Rada of Ukraine that formalized this new registration process.
• Nationwide Campaigns. In the fall of 2006, ISC launched a new civil society and advocacy project in Serbia—just before new elections in January 2007. With our partners, we supported get-out-the-vote campaigns around the country whose sole purpose was to encourage Serbians to use their voices and their vote in determining their country's future. Seventeen different activities used different approaches and strategies to inspire women, youth, and first-time voters to get to the polls at a time when many citizens have lost faith in their ability to play a role in determining Serbia's future.
• Leadership Programs. Our Leadership for a Changing World program has celebrated more than 100 leaders who have achieved remarkable results at the community level in the United States but whose accomplishments have not been widely recognized.
• Multiyear Trainings. In Ukraine, the Successful Communities Institute (a nonprofit founded by ISC's local staff) has launched a community leadership training program for representatives of nonprofits, community organizations, and businesses. The trainings, which take place over several years, are designed to introduce a new model of leadership to Ukraine based on trust, respect, partnership, and self-confidence.

What We Offer

The Advocacy and Leadership Center offers programs, trainings, and tools customized in length and content for each context and set of participants. We recommend a series of trainings that includes opportunities for practice, and we offer ongoing coaching and mentoring to help participants apply trainings to their own circumstances. We bring in local trainers to work alongside master trainers to expand the number of skilled advocacy practitioners around the world. We then help these leaders form networks that can sustain an advocacy movement beyond specific projects. Our Programs and Trainings

Who We Are

Our trainings and tools, including a publicly available curriculum, have been honed over two decades by the Institute for Sustainable Communities and the Advocacy Institute, which merged in the fall of 2006. The Center brings together the Advocacy Institute's pioneering advocacy training and expertise with ISC's groundbreaking work in establishing advocacy as a critical tool for encouraging citizen participation. About the Center