Paper/Proposal Title
Toward a Human Rights Impact Assessment Tool
Location
Impact and Measurement Tools
Start Date
10-4-2019 10:30 AM
End Date
10-4-2019 12:00 PM
Keywords
impact, assessment tool, constituency building, collaboration, movement building
Abstract
Human rights organizations are increasingly questioned about impact, which is particularly challenging for overextended and under-resourced groups that tackle complex issues requiring a long view to be achieved. They would greatly benefit from a manageable assessment tool to capture how well they are doing on key dimensions that are essential for that long-view impact. Building on my experience with the Ford Foundation’s Organizational Mapping Tool designed to assess organizational capacity, I propose to develop a tool to assess human rights impact.
The tool will enable any human rights organization to assess how it is doing in areas that are essential to the wider human rights movement, if we are to achieve our long-range objective of fully human rights respecting societies. The tool will capture, for example, organizations’ strengths/weaknesses in areas such as constituency building, collaboration, de-siloing, shifting power, and other dimensions that are extremely difficult to assess but are essential to building a successful human rights movement. The self-administered, highly participatory tool will provide organizations an opportunity to reflect on their contributions to that wider human rights movement, point to what else they can do, and identify tangible ways of getting there.
I envision a session devoted to either a presentation of the actual tool or enlisting session participants in fleshing out descriptors for its key components, depending on where I am with the development of the tool by the time of the Conference. Minimally, the session will actively engage human rights practitioners and researchers in considering the dimensions of our issue-, country-, and methodologically-specific work from a movement-wide view.
Author/Speaker Biographical Statement(s)
Mona Younis, Ph.D. is an independent strategic planning and evaluation consultant who specializes in human rights.
Mona has consulted for a wide range of human rights organizations and funders that include the Center for Victims of Torture, Human Rights Center of the University of Minnesota Law School, Human Rights First, Open Society Foundations, and Wellspring Advisors, among others. Prior to consulting, Mona served as director of the AAAS Science and Human Rights Program, human rights program officer at the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, and coordinator of the International Human Rights Funders Group. She also co-founded the Fund for Global Human Rights (Washington, DC) and the Arab Human Rights Fund (Beirut, Lebanon). Mona holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley and earned her Bachelor and Master degrees at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Included in
Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, Human Rights Law Commons, Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons
Toward a Human Rights Impact Assessment Tool
Impact and Measurement Tools
Human rights organizations are increasingly questioned about impact, which is particularly challenging for overextended and under-resourced groups that tackle complex issues requiring a long view to be achieved. They would greatly benefit from a manageable assessment tool to capture how well they are doing on key dimensions that are essential for that long-view impact. Building on my experience with the Ford Foundation’s Organizational Mapping Tool designed to assess organizational capacity, I propose to develop a tool to assess human rights impact.
The tool will enable any human rights organization to assess how it is doing in areas that are essential to the wider human rights movement, if we are to achieve our long-range objective of fully human rights respecting societies. The tool will capture, for example, organizations’ strengths/weaknesses in areas such as constituency building, collaboration, de-siloing, shifting power, and other dimensions that are extremely difficult to assess but are essential to building a successful human rights movement. The self-administered, highly participatory tool will provide organizations an opportunity to reflect on their contributions to that wider human rights movement, point to what else they can do, and identify tangible ways of getting there.
I envision a session devoted to either a presentation of the actual tool or enlisting session participants in fleshing out descriptors for its key components, depending on where I am with the development of the tool by the time of the Conference. Minimally, the session will actively engage human rights practitioners and researchers in considering the dimensions of our issue-, country-, and methodologically-specific work from a movement-wide view.
