Partners for Dignity & Rights

Human rights envision a just world, where everyone is treated with dignity, everyone's human needs are met, and everyone can thrive and reach their full potential. We can build this world together by ensuring people have a meaningful role in the decisions that shape their lives, that resources are shared based on people's needs, and that goods and services to meet people's fundamental needs are provided not for private profits, but as public goods that belong to all.

Since 2004 Partners for Dignity & Rights (formerly NESRI) has been working through our grassroots partnerships to harness the power of people and communities to transform our society through the human rights principles of universality and equity, so that everyone is able to get what they need and give what they can. We must change our political and economic structures to create a world where schools support the full academic and social development of every child, where the equitable use of land and resources for housing ensures that every person has an adequate home, where democratization of the economy empowers workers to secure their right to work with dignity, and where a universal, publicly financed health care system provides everyone with the care they need.

To realize this vision, Partners for Dignity & Rights supports struggles led by people most affected by inequality, inequity and injustice. Together we pursue meaningful changes that directly improve people's lives now, and we lay the groundwork for transformational change by building a movement for human rights.

STRENGTHENING PUBLIC GOODS
We advance universal public systems, including housing, health care, education and social protection.

ADVANCING EQUITY AND JUSTICE
We dismantle systemic oppression, exploitation and discrimination to create inclusive systems, policies and practices that ensure the full realization of economic and social rights for all.

BUILDING POWER
We support communities and workers in creating collective action and organizing for participatory and accountable systems that ensure human rights and deepen democracy.

Partners for Dignity & Rights supports struggles led by people most impacted by inequality, inequity and injustice. Together we pursue meaningful changes that directly improve people’s lives now, and we lay the groundwork for transformational change by building a movement for human rights.

CAMPAIGN COORDINATION AND SUPPORT
Partners for Dignity & Rights provides multi-disciplinary and direct support to our partners’ campaigns, including the coordination of coalitions emerging from joint work. This support includes strategy, policy, research and documentation, advocacy, communications and alliance building support. This is our central body of work, grounded in our long-term partnerships.

MODEL SOLUTIONS
Partners for Dignity & Rights co-develops transformative legal and policy models with grassroots partners that codify and institutionalize people’s values, visions and demands in concrete, implementable, scalable and replicable policy and other solutions.

LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT AND ORGANIZING SUPPORT
Partners for Dignity & Rights works with our partners in developing leadership pipelines, learning cultures and the full integration of a human rights organizing approach into their work. Building individual and collective leadership enables organizations to assert the power of those most impacted by human rights violations.

STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS
Partners for Dignity & Rights advances bold ideas on how to organize our society to ensure economic and social rights. We work to shift the debate on the need for public goods, equity and inclusion of all communities and democratizing power and wealth.

Partners for Dignity & Rights partners with community organizations to elevate their voices, strengthen their campaigns and effect change. Working in a participatory way and guided by human rights principles, whether we take action on the ground, foster coalition building, or offer broader analysis, we are accountable to decisions made collectively with our partners and grassroots leadership.

Through our collaborations, Partners for Dignity & Rights gives national impact to local actions by developing replicable and scalable models and spreading them across the country. We bring an inclusive human rights approach that builds power, shifts narratives and debates, and changes policies by putting people's experiences at the center and bridging divisions between issues and communities.

Throughout our history, Partners for Dignity & Rights has worked in deep partnership with community organizations across the country and helped found and anchor both the national Dignity in Schools Campaign, now in 28 states, and the Worker-driven Social Responsibility Network.

Through these relationships, we have been part of groundbreaking victories stopping the criminalization of Black and Brown youth in schools and creating restorative justice alternatives, securing public financing for community land trusts, creating seminal programs governed by workers to enforce human rights in the workplace, and advancing universal health care campaigns in multiple states. This wealth of work all centers the leadership of poor and working class people, especially Black and Brown communities, as those who are most impacted by injustices and are thus in the best position to identify and build solutions to systematic injustices. All of this culminates in our New Social Contract project, which offers community-driven solutions to current injustices and a shared, community-led vision for social and political change.

In 2021, we are focusing our New Social Contract project on reshaping public finance, to challenge the forces of austerity, privatization, deregulation and tax cuts that have been used to increase income and wealth inequality, and to advance economic democracy as an operational framework for public goods, resources and institutions. These two themes weave through all of our program areas and are essential to all economic and social rights, particularly in an era marked by privatization of public goods, growing inequality, domination of workers and communities by private power, and the racist oppression of people of color and erosion of public trust and social solidarity.