HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Recommendations to Funders to Improve Mental Health and Wellbeing in the Human Rights Field 

Improving and maintaining well-being is essential to individual health, to organizational functioning, and to the sustainability and effectiveness of the human rights field as a whole. There are many concrete, immediately actionable reforms that are achievable in the near-term and which address a variety of causes of distress, or which can support efforts to transform the field over the long term. Such steps should be taken while the human rights field works toward deep transformation. 

Human rights advocacy can be a source of significant joy, purpose, political agency, belonging, and community. Yet advocates can also experience harms, and trauma in their efforts to advance justice and equality, including those caused by heavy workloads, time pressures, discrimination and bullying in the workplace, vicarious exposure to trauma and human rights abuse, and direct experience of threats and attacks. Advocates can experience suffering, sometimes very severe, as a result, including demotivation, alienation, anxiety, fear, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. How advocates experience their work and any resulting harms can vary widely, and may be highly contextual and culturally specific.

Improving and maintaining well-being is essential to individual health, to organizational functioning, and to the sustainability and effectiveness of the human rights field as a whole. 

Positively transforming mental health and well-being in the human rights field will require significant reforms and both structural changes and close attention to the contextually-specific needs of individual advocates and organizations. The causes and dynamics at play are complex, and there are no quick fixes that can address the cultural shifts required. As efforts are taken to improve well-being, it is important that the field avoids tick-the-box or commodified approaches. Improving the wellbeing of human rights advocates requires a holistic response and a movement-wide prioritization of well-being, with careful attention to context, culture, and the diverse needs of advocates and organizations.  

Recognition of the deeply-rooted problems requiring radical change or of the complexities of the issues and the difficulty of defining a clear set of recommendations applicable across the board should not operate as an excuse to take no action now to improve well-being. There are many concrete, immediately actionable reforms that are achievable in the near-term and which address a variety of causes of distress, or which can support efforts to transform the field over the long term. Such steps should be taken while the human rights field works toward deep transformation. Some of these steps include the following recommended actions, which are drawn from our research with advocates around the world.