Blog: New Rights in Action report shows far-reaching impact

Our Rights in Action project works to raise awareness of economic, social and cultural rights and to support communities to add human rights to their collective power.   

In the most recent phase of Rights in Action, we brought together six national campaigning organisations using the action learning methodology to build their capacity to and deepen their practice of taking a human rights based approach.  Over the course of six months, the participants came together for human rights training, and met five times to explore issues they were facing in their work which related to the PANEL principles.   

Today we publish Strengthening Rights-based Approaches in Campaigning Organisations to share the learning from this phase of the project.   

Throughout the six months of the project organisations explored wide ranging issues including how to: improve representativeness of participation; stand alongside people with lived experience to influence and persuade Scottish Government to take further action to tackle deep child poverty; and empower a minority group to name and claim their rights and to challenge decisions that impact them in housing, health and employment.   

The impacts of this project have been far-reaching and include: an organisation engaging with children’s rights based approaches and arguments in policy and campaigns work; increased understanding of accountability gaps around the provision of a key service; increased confidence in talking about human rights; using human rights to shape research reports; putting in place plans to set up a human rights hub to provide a minority community with accessible information about human rights; and an increased organisational capacity to do practical human rights work.   

“It’s having that subject knowledge and familiarity with human rights and thinking about them more as an integrated part of my work.”  

 As with previous action learning sets facilitated as part of Rights in Action, participants valued the dedicated thinking time and the peer support that the methodology provides.  

“What I've been able to learn from people...You know in having that wider sense of some of the challenges and we're not alone”  

 Evaluation interviews highlighted that the national campaigning organisations involved found the combination of human rights education and action learning methodology helpful, despite challenges posed by working in a fast-changing policy environment.   

“It's quite a unique programme, and I would recommend it to other organisations to do.”