In October 2006, the Advocacy Institute merged with the Institute for Sustainable Communities to form the Advocacy Center at ISC. The Center brings two decades of groundbreaking work from both organizations under one roof, with a mission of helping ordinary people influence the key institutions and decisions that shape their lives—and a deep-seated belief that societies thrive only when their nonprofit sectors are strong and autonomous.

The Center offers training to emerging leaders and established nonprofits around the world and in the United States. Rather than prescribing issues to be addressed, we give citizens and nonprofits the tools, skills, and funding they need to improve their communities. To date, we have trained 800 leaders from 52 countries.

---

Mission
The Advocacy Institute works to make social justice leadership strategic, effective, and sustainable in pursuit of a just world.


Vision
Founded in 1985, the Advocacy Institute remains grounded in the following core values as it works to achieve a just society:

-justice for those denied justice;
-economic equality for those denied sustenance and opportunity;
-public health and security for those at preventable risk; and
-access to political power for those who have been denied an equal voice in the policy-making process.

In such a society, all people are able to participate fully in shaping public values and policies.

Through reflection, networking with fellow advocates and skill strengthening, the Advocacy Institute facilitates capacity building workshops and seminars that aim to strengthen social movements. These advocates draw on their sources of power through stories, the use of symbols and metaphors and find practical ways to navigate complex policy systems so that they can advance their public agendas.


The Advocacy Institute equally seeks to augment social justice and civic advocacy leadership by expanding its public recognition and appreciation of its breadth, effectiveness and importance to a robust civil society that respects its social change leadership and its right to advocate.


Through convening, counseling and facilitating the Advocacy Institute works to further strengthen the movements served by:

-Developing a deeper understanding of effective leadership roles;
-Developing the capacity to better plan, advocate and communicate strategically;
-Building and sustaining broader, diverse and cohesive alliances within issue movements and across social justice movements;
-Sustaining themselves and each other.
-Holding the Advocacy Institute to the standard of a learning and innovating organization that practices and embodies: Transparency; Hope; Excellence; Reflection; Affirming others; Modeling; and Pragmatism. It symbolizes a ramp, a metaphor for reaching upward.