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ResolutionNumber:
1
Year: 2008 Title: Expanding Human Rights Education Resolved:
[A] RECALLING that human rights education is arguably the greatest tool any human rights organization has for building future generations of human rights advocates; [B] RECALLING that, at least in the Mid-Atlantic region, we can't give our eager Human Rights Education volunteers enough to do; [C] RECALLING that once people come into contact with the Human Rights Education Service Corps (HRESC), they become committed to education as not just a tactic, but the tactic for sustainable global change; [D] ACKNOWLEDGING that volunteers with completely unrelated backgrounds come through our program and go on to teach - something they'd never considered before joining with Amnesty's small but thriving Human Rights Education staff and programs; [E] BEARING IN MIND that Amnesty International already educates: through the media, through government relations, through activist training, through our reports; [F] BEARING IN MIND that every year, millions of American schoolchildren pass through eleven or twelve years of required schooling, yet most of them will never hear of Amnesty International, never read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and never answer the call to action that we so eloquently and compellingly voice in other venues; [G] BEARING IN MIND that throughout human rights literature and advocacy we claim that Human Rights are inherent, yet the reality is that people do not enter the world versed in the ins and outs of their own rights, those of their neighbors, and those of strangers across the globe; [H] BEARING IN MIND that we must give young people these human rights tools as early as possible if we hold any hope for global peace through our grassroots work; [I] BEARING IN MIND that Amnesty International is, in the opinion of many human rights education activists, not engaging in human rights education advocacy and promotion explicitly enough or energetically enough; [J] BEARING IN MIND that currently, the AIUSA Human Rights Education Program is under-resourced, under-staffed, and scattered in various cities with different identities in each;
[K] WHEREAS human rights education has continued to have a lackluster profile within AIUSA; and [L] WHEREAS, most importantly, human rights education presents unique opportunities to strengthen Amnesty International’s work throughout the world and enforce the effects of our specific priority work. [M] THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that AIUSA’s Board of Directors supports the expansion of AIUSA’s Human Rights Education programs in the context of AIUSA’s strategic planning process; [N] BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that as an initial effort to raise the profile of Human Rights Education there should be a more explicit link from the main AIUSA website to the Human Rights Education section of the website with regular updates; [O] BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the AIUSA Board of Directors is strongly encouraged to: 1) Put more of Amnesty's resources toward expanding and nationalizing our current Human Rights Education work, 2) Greatly strengthen the resources we offer individual Human Rights Educators in schools around the country, 3) Strategically evaluate and improve, through additional funding and capacity building if necessary, the city-wide programs that are already flourishing in several regions, as well as allocating resources for programs in public schools in suburban and rural areas, 4) Take the time to evaluate our successes in these programs and plan strategically how we can improve our work, 5) Provide every regional office the capacity and resources to run successful Human Rights Education programs, 6) Write the International Secretariat (IS) requesting that the IS provide assurances, in writing, that the Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ESCR) global campaign on human rights and poverty will include specific actions on Human Rights Education, and 7) Report to the membership prior to January 1, 2009 as to the response of the International Secretariat regarding this request. |