American Jewish World Service, Inc.

Our mission is to advance human rights and end poverty around the globe, ensuring a more just and equitable society for the world’s most vulnerable people. To do this, we strive toward the following goals:

1. To empower women, girls and LGBTQI people to promote equality, stop violence and discrimination and live with dignity, safety and health.

2. To advance civil and political rights around the globe—promoting justice under the law for all and the right to be heard, vote and participate in political life.

3. To slow climate change and protect the land, water and natural resources that rural and indigenous people depend on for survival.

4. To save lives after natural disasters and humanitarian crises and build more equitable societies in the wake of these events.

AJWS supports 487 grantees in 19 countries that are achieving remarkable progress on some of the most pressing global problems—from authoritarianism, to attacks on women’s and LGBTQI rights, to climate change and disasters. On each of these issues, we advance strategies that are deeply aligned with the vision and expertise of our grantees, because we believe that the people experiencing complex human rights challenges should be at the center of all efforts to solve them. Currently, we have a total of 38 strategies across our programs in each country and issue area. These strategies guide our work on priority issues and include 10-year goals, three-year outcomes and annual milestones toward each outcome.

In each country and issue area, we identify dynamic constellations of grantees that are working towards shared goals. We provide each group with tailored mentorship delivered by our “in-country-consultants” (ICCs)—local human rights experts fluent in the languages, challenges, and unique loci of power in each community. The ICCs increase our grantees’ capacity and facilitate intensive collaboration, so that they can launch collective campaigns and participate in broader social movements. Working together, these organizations and movements have overturned unjust laws, changed the outcome of elections, shifted social norms and saved countless lives after humanitarian crises.

We also stoke the engines of change here in the U.S., where our staff influence Congress and advance legislation and policy on these same human rights issues. Through our Global Justice Fellowship, we mobilize influential rabbis from across the country to join these campaigns and inspire their congregants to call for justice by our side. And we create opportunities for our grantees to raise their voices in Washington and on the global stage.

We call this our “grassrooted” and “tiered” approach to social change. We connect grassroots organizations horizontally to one another and vertically to national and international organizations, allies and decision-making bodies such as international courts and the United Nations. The organizations we support build movements in the developing world while we take action from the U.S., and together we are able to move levers of change at different tiers of society.

AJWS started as a small organization, but now invests $36 million a year in grantmaking and social change strategies to promote global human rights. And since our founding, we have provided more than $400 million to support thousands of social justice organizations in the developing world. The following approaches enable us to meet our goals:

Investment Strategy and grantmaking: AJWS focuses on four key areas of human rights: We defend civil and political rights; advance sexual health and rights; promote natural resource rights and climate justice; and aid communities in the aftermath of disasters. We develop comprehensive strategies for each issue and in each country, based on our deep and ongoing analysis of the problems we address and of the social and political landscape. These strategies enable us to identify the best investments (in grantees, advocacy and research) and then track our progress toward our long-term goals in each country.

To advance these strategies, AJWS supports 519 social change organizations in 19 countries. Exercising rigorous due diligence, our in-country representatives identify the most promising and effective activists and organizations to fund—focusing particularly on those who work with women, minorities and others who experience the most severe discrimination, oppression or exclusion from society. We invest in trusted relationships with our grantees; listen to and learn from them; and build their capacity with tailored trainings and support in order foster the growth of strong, capable organizations and activists that are equipped to meet the complex needs of the communities they serve.

We also connect our grantees to peer organizations and national and global networks and advocacy spaces, so that they can build and participate in powerful social movements that can change laws and transform society. By strengthening grassroots organizations and activist leaders, we ensure that those most affected by injustice are at the center of conversations about solutions—in their communities, nationally and globally.

Advocacy, Education & Communications: AJWS conducts advocacy and digital engagement in the U.S. and globally to call attention to human rights abuses and amplify the voices of our grantees. Together, we strive to influence U.S. and global laws, policies and social norms to improve the lives of millions of people in the developing world.

Research, Evaluation & Learning: AJWS conducts research and evaluation to strengthen our own work and advance the broader field of human rights. We collect meaningful data on our grantmaking and the human rights issues we address. We consistently hone our thinking and strategies based on new evidence. We share our findings with our grantees as possible while also promoting their research. We do this to ensure that we learn from one another, amplify the voices of our grantees in human rights movements, and influence the public discourse on effective approaches to social change.

In 2020, AJWS supported 519 social justice organizations fighting poverty and promoting human rights in 19 countries. Together, they’re tackling pressing issues in four thematic areas that include Civil and Political Rights (161 grantees), Land Water and Climate Justice (158 grantees), Sexual Health and Rights (185 grantees), and Humanitarian Response (19 grantees).

AJWS’s programmatic approach to social change focuses on three core pillars: supporting our grantees to increase their capacity, supporting their advocacy, and supporting the growth of strong social movements in the countries where they work. Across these categories, in 2020 we found that AJWS and our grantees were making progress on 84% of the strategic outcomes we aimed to achieve.

AJWS is committed to supporting grantees that are working to strengthen their own capacities. For instance, 37% of our grantees received capacity-building support through our grants in 2020, and we saw progress on 76% of our capacity-building outcomes. AJWS also provides grants to young organizations: 40% of our 2020 grantees were founded within 5 years of their first AJWS grant.

AJWS supports its grantees to advance legislative and policy change: We are currently working on 153 laws, policies, regulations, and international agreements to protect human rights. Achieving this kind of legal transformation takes time, and in 2020, we were gratified that our grantees made major or minor progress on 39% of these, and successfully achieved 6 of these goals. The successes include major transformations include such as the adoption, amendment, implementation, or blocking of a policy goal.

AJWS supports thousands of activists and their organizations to create strong social movements that are rising up to tip the scales toward justice. Our grantees are deeply engaged in social movements and working together to achieve change. Seventy-six percent are members of networks or coalitions that work together to effect sustainable change. For instance, our grantees in Guatemala are building a powerful movement to challenge their authoritarian government and create a more equitable society. Indigenous communities in Thailand are working together to protect their ancestral forests.

AJWS believes in continuous improvement of its programs through investments in learning, reflection, and evaluation. By placing learning at the center of the work, AJWS strives to maximize its impact in the field of human rights.