This article was published more than 4 years ago.
Throughout this turbulent year, community-based activists and local leaders have remained powerful sources of social change and hope.
At the Fund for Global Human Rights, we pause, if only for a moment, to recognize a major milestone in our work supporting frontline activists and the extraordinary people who brought us here. To date, we have distributed $100 million in support to local activists tackling injustice, inequality, corruption, and poverty around the world.
When the Fund was launched in 2002, getting funding to community-led groups and grassroots leaders was difficult. We were created to fill this gap, and shift power and resources into the hands of local people—activists who were doing invaluable work on the front lines of human rights struggles, but who didn’t typically receive support from the international community.
A year after our founding, we distributed $1 million of support to community-based and grassroots initiatives in Latin America, South Asia, and West Africa. Within six years, we had expanded to North Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Great Lakes region of sub-Saharan Africa and more than tripled our support to locally led groups. Today we continue our work in these regions, while also running global programs that help connect activists from different parts of the world around critical rights issues.
Over the past 18 years, we’ve moved $100 million of financial resources and strategic support to more than 700 local groups in 50-plus countries. Along the way, we’ve helped make groundbreaking progress toward a more just, equal world, including:
- Supporting activists in Guatemala who secured the first-ever conviction for forced disappearance.
- Fueling the advocacy of organizations in Tunisia which led to the country’s first law addressing domestic violence.
- Backing groups that secured the first law protecting human rights activists in the DRC, including the right to freedom of assembly and expression.
- To learn more about these and other major victories and milestones, view our full $100 million timeline.
Today, we’re experiencing another pivotal moment for our world. There are injustices that demand accountability, unequal systems to be dismantled and rebuilt, and doors of opportunity to be opened. We are committed to ensuring the next $100 million of our support fuels community-led efforts to solve these challenges.
