The ski resort of Borovets in Bulgaria several years ago was the scene for me of a very powerful experience in my work trying to support people to campaign for change. I had been in this beautiful location for several days doing some work supporting Roma communities...
Over the past few months I have been doing some work for a global organisation working to support refugees to help them think through some of the advocacy angles around the challenge of climate change. This is a really important question and one that has been around...
One question that I have been thinking quite a lot about over last few months is how do you make a campaign take off? In a lot of my work around the world, my initial focus for support is helping people think through their campaign message. And, as I written about...
Late last year I had the good fortune to travel out to Lake Ohrid in North Macedonia to support a regional advocacy workshop run by the Swiss INGO, Helvetas. This regional network had been running for several years and was well established, and Helvetas wanted me to...
I’m just back from my first international assignment in a while. I had the pleasure of working in Lake Ohrid, North Macedonia supporting an advocacy network across the Western Balkans. There was a focus on three key areas: Firstly, we discussed the importance of...
I've recently been doing some work supporting a group in Kenya to develop an advocacy campaign, and I heard myself encouraging them to go on a fishing trip. What did I mean by that? Well, we had spent a lot of time thinking about our campaign message, our targets and...
I've recently been working 'in' Sierra Leone, and I recently met up with colleagues, who urgently told me that they needed to change the future story. We've been working well together discussing a common approach to advocacy campaigning, and agreeing our key messages...
I recently ran a workshop session for two INGOs to help them in developing a future story in Liberia. They were looking to launch a new report as the catalyst for a new piece of advocacy around food security and nutrition. What was immediately striking for me was that...
Over the past few months, I’ve been supporting a number of groups around the world to develop their theory of change, or future story, for their campaign. In both Tajikistan and Ukraine, I’ve been supporting coalitions of parents’ groups initially by providing them...
Over the past few months in the advocacy training that I have been running across Eastern Europe and Central Asia, I found myself focusing on two words: confidence and humility. I found that having done an initial training in advocacy, it is often the case that people...