Our Approach
We contribute a mix of capacity strengthening assistance, funding, and strategic guidance to our partners as a means of catalyzing their efforts to protect and promote the human rights of their communities.
By addressing capacity gaps, partners are better prepared to assume leadership within human rights movements; by providing funding, partners have the resources required to sustain their work; and by providing strategic guidance, partners can better define those avenues through which human rights advocacy will gain the most traction.
At the core of our work, Synergía’s human rights advocacy centers on leveraging human rights frameworks to address social, cultural, legal, political, and religious systems in which violence and discrimination are entrenched. This work includes educating and mobilizing communities to demand respect for their human rights; documenting and providing recourse to individuals who have experienced a human rights violation or abuse; and using documented evidence to demand action from those responsible for guaranteeing those rights.
In many regions, those who advocate for human rights are often targeted on the basis of their work. Thus, supporting our partners to identify and mitigate risks is of critical importance to the resilience and longevity of the movements we support. We work with partners to develop security strategies that not only reduce the likelihood of these risks, but that also provide rapid response in the event of unforeseen crises.
We believe human rights movements are strongest when they reflect the diversity of those communities they represent. Thus, our movement strengthening work seeks to engage those activists and organizations that face particular barriers that prevent them from engaging in these movements. Our work also seeks to support longevity of movements by strengthening the organizational capacity of our partners so that they can plan, fund, and manage human rights programs that are accountable to their constituents.
Our Impact
While we understand that the full enjoyment of human rights by all can only be achieved in the long term, we see our successes and their associated impact as steps toward this long-term goal.
While our impact can look different from region to region, our major successes include working with our partners to:
- Create positive impact on human rights movements, including promoting more pluralistic and representative civil society groups and organizations that can sustain long-term human rights advocacy.
- Creating positive impact on marginalized communities, including the creation of paralegal programs that offer recourse to individuals who have experienced human rights violations and abuses.
- Create positive impact on societies at large, including improved understanding of and support for the human rights guaranteed to marginalized communities – through more balanced reporting by media stakeholders, more effective legal representation from human rights lawyers, stronger protection offered by religious leaders, and increased opportunities to advance human rights protections within State mechanisms.
- Strengthening domestic, regional, and international human rights standards and mechanisms, including the passage of Resolution 275 by the African commission for Human and Peoples’ rights; continued passage of the LGBTI resolution at the General Assembly of the Organization of American Sates; passage of the Inter-American Convention Against All Forms of Discrimination and Intolerance; increased numbers of public hearings before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a positive ruling of the Inter-American Court through its Advisory Opinion OC-24/17; and more consistent inclusion of LGBTIQ issues in State review processes before a range of UN treaty bodies.
Support Our Work
Your support will further our work by offering flexible resources that will be used to advance our provision of capacity strengthening, funding, and strategic guidance to our partners. The flexibility of this support is vital when there is an opportunity to take advantage of a quickly emerging opportunity or when responding to an emerging crisis. This ultimately creates more adaptive and resilient movements that are necessary to ensure human rights for all.