After decades of tremendous progress, human rights defenders are now struggling against rising authoritarianism, even within countries long regarded as bastions of democracy, further challenging the movement’s vision and capacities. The long-term goal of all rights for all people seems impossibly distant.
A government’s respect for human rights is driven by the expectations of its citizens, and yet the prospect of citizen majorities demanding that their governments meet their full human rights obligations seems ever more distant. Demands for human rights organizations to deliver immediate, tangible, and measurable impact push the larger vision and the work required to achieve it to the fringes. The assumption is that either rights-respecting governance will emerge cumulatively or future generations will figure out how to achieve it. But in the meantime and in the absence of citizen-led demands, governments will permit the erosion or elimination of what broad gains have been made.
Thinking about impact
Confronted by crises and emerging threats, those working on the frontlines of human rights often struggle to find the time to reflect deeply on “impact.” Donors increasingly emphasize measurable results, and much of the effort to plan for and measure the impact of human rights work responds to their demands. Conventional approaches focus on individual organizations and the impact they seek, the impact they can claim, and what they can do to improve their impact in the future.
However important the work or achievements of a single organization, approaching human rights impact solely in such terms fails to address how well the broader project of human rights is going. It can also inadvertently reinforce competition, create silos of rights and issues, privilege certain approaches over others, and narrow attention to what is most easily measured. This approach to “impact” has obscured some of the fundamental work needed to realize the long-term goal of human rights: all rights for all people.
So what is needed for long-term, collective impact? History and sociology teach us that sustainable progress toward securing rights requires ordinary citizens to recognize their entitlements and join together to demand change. The work needed to engage communities, influence public opinion, build power, and consolidate movements is often less tangible than much of the shorter-term work carried out by human rights advocates. It also relies on the coordinated efforts of many people both inside and outside the human rights movement.
This work is hard to define, harder to measure, and, thus, very difficult to secure funding. Most human rights activists instinctively recognize its importance, and the capabilities to perform it exist in the human rights movement. But the imperatives of funding mean that it is often deprioritized.
From organization to movement
Individual human rights organizations will always focus their strategies on particular issues or specialize in certain approaches. Addressing new violations and threats to the rights of specific groups is meaningful and necessary. But the collective impact of human rights organizations will be stronger if individual organizations allow themselves the space to reflect on their contribution to longer-term goals only attainable by an expansive and inclusive movement for human rights.
Over the course of several years of research and interviews with members of human rights organizations around the world, we identified seven key areas where human rights defenders need to advance together to safeguard the movement’s long-term goals. These are: engaging communities, influencing public opinion, building constituencies, bridging rights, deepening collaboration, creating power, and strengthening movements. Human rights organizations throughout the world are taking up these challenges.
Many groups are going beyond increasing communication to create narratives that encourage the public to act on human rights. Others are moving from episodic partnerships to deeper and ongoing relationships, treating collaboration as an end in itself and not merely a means to an end. Still others are countering the fragmentation and siloing of rights by restoring the holistic intent of human rights. Questions about what “impact” we, as human rights defenders, seek and how we work toward it deserve closer attention, and human rights organizations would surely benefit from the space to consider them.
The Platform for Rights Impact Strategy Mapping (PRISM) is designed to create such spaces and support strategic reflection and planning. We began developing this tool in 2024, with the support of a small group of colleagues at INTRAC, and through the initiative Rethinking Rights Impact, we have engaged human rights practitioners to review, evaluate, and refine it. We have since piloted PRISM with human rights organizations in Egypt, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States to assess how well it enables organizations to reflect on their contributions to the long-term vision of the movement.
The experiences of the pilot organizations confirmed the value of strategic planning from a perspective that emphasizes an organization's contribution to the larger human rights movement and its long-term goals. Staff of the pilot groups have credited the PRISM workshops with enabling them to sharpen their strategies for and thinking about developing community engagement, influencing public debates about human rights, and creating power in support of longer-term, movement-level goals.
Meeting the challenge
As of April 2026, PRISM is available for use by organizations that aspire to strengthen our movement for fully rights-respecting states. It might seem naïve to frame a project as working toward all rights for all people—yet as human rights practitioners, we must acknowledge this as the ultimate goal of human rights work. The challenge before us is this: Can we collectively join focused, short-term goals with the planning necessary to support essential long-term work? And can we conceive of all rights for all people not as a distant dream but as an organizing principle capable of guiding collective impact planning and measurement today?