Advocacy and Strategies that build Collective Power
About the session: Advocacy strategies often focus on the people who have the power to make the change we seek. This focus can unintentionally disempower and leave behind the communities that might benefit from the change. The intersectionalities of sex workers, men who have sex with men, transgender people, people who inject drugs,
people in prisons and people living with HIV make empowerment a difficult and long path. We need to ensure that our advocacy strategies are not short-sighted but keep
an eye on a long-term goal that will lead to positive and lasting change for our communities.
This participatory workshop will allow participants to examine and determine how to overcome the challenges they face in developing advocacy strategies that build power
for those who don’t have it but should. We will explore ways of understanding power domains that fit our contexts combined with methodologies for stakeholder mapping
that can help us formulate tactics that will empower key populations.
Outcomes:
-A deeper understanding of how to address power domains and intersectionalities in advocacy campaigns.
-Exploration of tactics for engaging key populations in co-creating advocacy campaign
-Connection to others who are grappling with similar issues
Speaker: Dirk Slater
Dirk Slater founded FabRiders in 2012, building on his experience supporting social justice movement building. Throughout his professional career, he has explored adult learning theories, along with methodologies to tap collective knowledge, in a quest to create practical workshop sessions and strategic event design. He has coached over a thousand trainers and facilitators to integrate adult learning methodologies in their session design and implement practical workshop sessions at significant events like RightsCon and MozFest. Dirk has worked on over a hundred projects for various clients on social change issues in over 30 countries. He is editor of The Collective Power Playbook, co-editor of IFRC’s Data Playbook, and co-convenor of The Capacity Builders’ Convergence.
