THE ADVOCACY PROJECT

1. Build strong and lasting partnerships with advocates for marginalized communities in the Global South that face poverty, discrimination and violence.
2. Strengthen the capacity of our partners to take action against the causes of their disempowerment by telling their story and developing campaigns.
3. (Long-term) By working through community advocates, to produce social change that will change policy and so affect the society as a whole.
4. Recruit and train qualified graduate students who will lend us their talents and passion and provide capacity-building services to our partners - while in the process undergoing a unique educational and professional experience.
5. Run a small and lean operation that draws on networking and contacts to achieve our goals, rather than expensive central operation and field offices. Our fundraising is geared first and foremost towards partners.

1. Choose partners: We wait for organizations to approach us, make a field visit, and send a Peace Fellow to assess the organization's needs. If we both agreed to go forward we then formalize the partnership and deepen the relationship in year 2. Partnerships are open-ended - and some partners have taken Peace Fellows for ten years.
2. Develop programs: During the initial field visit, and through Peace Fellows, we will help the new partner to identify program goals and explore new openings, drawing on our experience and network. We ask all partners to make a commitment to developing a program, with goals, within 2 years. We expect to implement the program jointly, with the local partner taking the lead. We try to withdraw from the program within five years, by which time the program should be completed or sustainable, and AP never takes more than 20% of the total program budget.
3. Provide services: Our Peace Fellows are trained to provide technical assistance and produce outputs within 10 weeks which address the partner's needs. For example, these services may seek to strengthen the partner's organization and position the partner to undertake a long-term program (book-keeping, money management, Excel, developing a budget, building an IT capacity, proposal writing, photography).
4. Fundraising: We work with partners to raise funds for the program, and then design strategies for each program. This can range from seeking government funding (US, Germany, Netherlands) or private donors (Global Giving, crowdfunding). We rely increasingly on our Peace Fellows to jump-start project funding. We have raised over $2 million for partner since 2006.
5. Setting goals and measuring results: Monitoring and Evaluation is extremely important and we do this with partners. See below.
6. International Outreach: We place a high premium on profiling our partners and programs through Video (450+ videos on YouTube) photos (24,680 photos on Flickr) quilting events, and advocacy in the Global North.

1. Experience. AP has worked with community-based advocates since our first partnership in 1998, with the International Campaign to create the International Criminal Court.
2. Staff. AP's staff has had extensive first-hand knowledge of the issues and areas. The Executive Director Iain Guest is a former journalist and UN official who has worked in many of the countries where AP now has partners. One of Iain's jobs is to initiate new partnerships.
3. Board. AP's experienced Board has included the heads of several nonprofits, specialists in migration and protection, an active ambassador, and a former UN Assistant Secretary-General. The AP Board is 100% giving.
4. Academic contacts and university partners: AP has drawn Peace Fellows from over 100 academic programs and universities. Each year, we typically attract up to 15 interns from universities in the Washington area.
5. Administration: We observe the highest standards of auditing insurance, book-keeping, annual reports, and reports to donors. We promote the same practices in advising our partners.
6. Institutional commitment to innovation: AP's value-added lies in being able to spot openings that may not be apparent to partners and helping to turn them into sustained programs. One example is advocacy quilting, which we launched in 2006 to help widowed weavers in Bosnia. Over thirty AP partners have told their story through embroidery and quilting.
7. Institutional commitment to service: This is best measured by the large number of men and women who volunteer to work with us – over 40 a year. They include students, schoolchildren, quilters, retirees and persons with a disability.

Accomplishments:
1. A network of community-based partners, organized into six categories (women, children, disability, conflict, minorities, environment). Some (Bosnian weavers) have been partners for over 10 years.
2. Service #1: Telling the story. We have developed an array of different tools that effectively tell the story of partners and provide content for their campaigns: blogs, website, video, photos, news bulletins (218,204 unique visits, views in 2014). This is offered to all partners, and expected to produce measurable results after 10 weeks.
3. Service # 2: Organizational strengthening, including IT support, management of money, program design, proposal writing, and working with the media. Offered to all partners and expected to produce results within 10 weeks.
4. Service #3: Support with the design, financing and implementation of programs/campaigns. These begin as pilot projects aimed at testing out an idea. If successful, we will then scale up and seek wider funding. The results achieved are spelled out on detail on our Bronze profile. We have helped to design programs on the European Roma; Women in Kosovo; girls' education in Afghanistan; Tamil rights in Sri Lanka during the war; war rape in DRC; child labor in Nepal; uterine prolapse in Nepal; accessible water and sanitation in Uganda; and war rape in Mali.
5. Service #4: Built a strong fellowship program to serve partners. Working with leading academic programs we have recruited 274 graduate students to volunteer with partners (2003 – 2015).
6. Built a strong organization. AP is efficient, well managed, and produce results on a small core program.
We have yet to develop:
1. Sufficient funding for our core program.
2. Institutional partners for our fellowship program, which faces growing competition from other, better-endowed fellowship programs.
3. Policy papers and policy recommendations from our programs.
4. Sustainability: We are too dependent on our founder, Iain Guest, yet at present lack the resources to attract new senior staff.
5. More rigorous internal procedures for monitoring and evaluation as we seek to raise more funds through private donors.