Equal Rights Institute

Train pro-life advocates in dialogue skills, greatly improving their ability to communicate with pro-choice people in a clear, relational manner.

Train pro-life advocates to navigate the complex political territory of issues surrounding abortion so that dialogues can be productive even if they are between people with incredibly different worldviews.

Train pro-life advocates to identify hidden premises in pro-choice rhetoric and thinking so that they can bring clarity to the conversation, find genuine common ground, and bring down walls which are preventing the other person from hearing the pro-life message.

Train pro-life advocates to understand the strongest pro-choice philosophical arguments as well as the most persuasive counter-arguments.

Train pro-life advocates to cultivate relationships with people who have different beliefs, for the sake of genuine friendship and for discovering truth together.

Train pro-life advocates in the most effective sidewalk counseling techniques, so they can save more lives and help more families outside of abortion facilities.

Public Speaking: These events are a very effective way to get our ethos and training content in front of a lot of people at one time, equipping them with some tools they can take away and instantly have better conversations, as well as give them a sense of what else they could learn from us down the road. As of September of 2022, we have spoken to 29,682 people at 262 speeches, and 23 seminars in four countries and 25 states since ERI began in 2014!

Writing articles: We write articles on our blog on the topics of practical dialogue tips, relational apologetics, pro-life philosophy, and sidewalk counseling, as well as responding to current events. Many of our students first engage with our content by finding one of our articles online. As of September of 2022, our blog has been read by 326,610 unique people!

Podcasts: Young people are engaging with podcasts, including long-form podcasts, more than reading articles. We’re meeting them where they’re at by publishing discussions, answers to listener questions, live speech audio, and organizational updates through our public podcast feeds. As of September of 2022, our podcast episodes have been downloaded 27,949 times!

Online courses: We published the Equipped for Life Course on practical dialogue tips and apologetics in 2016, and we published the Sidewalk Counseling Masterclass in 2019. The first course includes 30 lessons (making up about 4 hours of video content), along with group activities for students to digest the material together by answering questions or doing practice together. The second course includes 16 lessons (making up about 7 hours of content), a workbook with organized notes, easy to follow step-by-step instructions, FAQ’s, and 40 practical tips. Both courses include access to a private Facebook group where students can interact with our staff and each other. As of September of 2022, 3,796 people have enrolled in our online courses!

YouTube videos: Our most recent addition is the setup of a professional video studio in our office in order to more efficiently create high-quality and free video content for our students. As of September of 2022, our YouTube channel has gained 215,455 video views totaling roughly 17,100 HOURS of pro-life content watched!

TikTok videos: In January of 2022, we began publishing TikTok videos featuring Emily teaching pro-life apologetics, often by filming herself play both the pro-life and pro-choice parts. Our channel went viral almost immediately. We gained one million views in 3.5 months! As of September of 2022, we have 3.4 million views, 15,788 followers, 313,461 likes, 10,757 shares, and 100,433 comments! We've since added some of those videos to our YouTube and Instagram channels where they also perform very well.

Campus outreach: College campuses are our lab for R&D experiments with new dialogue tactics and arguments. When we learn from these experiments, we can develop better training for our students to improve their conversations.

We have invested in many outreaches on college campuses for our staff to collectively have thousands of conversations with pro-choice students so we can better understand how they think about abortion, which pro-life arguments they find convincing, and which barriers they have to becoming pro-life. Throughout this experience we have seen many minds change, shaped our philosophical content to register with the psychological perspective of pregnancy in our culture, and developed persuasive dialogue strategies.

Our staff share an ethos which prioritizes understanding pro-choice culture, worldview, and rhetoric so that we can understand the real reasons why people disagree with the pro-life position, rather than assuming why they have come to believe what they do. This approach helps us to analyze our training content through a robust, critical lens from the opposing viewpoint.

ERI has invested in an office space that includes a custom-built video and podcasting studio so that we can produce high-quality video and audio content. We film in 4K and use professional-grade audio equipment to ensure that the appearance of our final product matches the same standards as the innovative ideas we share.

In our first five years of ERI, we have produced two online courses with 46 total lessons for over 11 hours of training content.

As of September of 2022:
- We have spoken to 29,682 people at 262 speeches, and 23 seminars in four countries and 25 states!
- Our blog has been read by 326,610 unique people!
- Our podcast episodes have been downloaded 27,949 times!
- 3,796 people have enrolled in our online courses!
- Our YouTube channel has gained 215,455 video views totaling roughly 17,100 HOURS of pro-life content watched!
- Our TikTok channel has gained 3.4 million views!

We have invested resources into creating a professional video and podcast studio in our Charlotte office.

We are in the process of developing Equipped for Life Academy, an interactive curriculum designed especially for religious high school students. We will heavily market this at Catholic high school conferences across the country.

We plan to hire a development director who can help us exponentially grow our organization by streamlining our fundraising strategies and network.