National Table for
Human Rights Strategy

A space to build people-powered movements for dignity and democracy.

We can use the international human rights framework to build a popular culture in the US centered on dignity, equality, and solidarity.

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Across Democratic and Republican administrations, from the war on terror through Hurricane Katrina, the housing crash, Ferguson, Flint, family separation, the COVID-19 pandemic, Dobbs, mass deportation, and the rise of authoritarianism, the human rights framework informed action and shaped calls for accountability. However, a sober assessment of the state of human rights in the US needs only to point to daily headlines to understand that threats to dignity are growing.

Executive power is consolidating.
Funding streams are drying up.
Global machinery is weakening. Outrage is building.

Human rights is a useful container for constraining state-power and the excesses of capitalist markets.

Human rights struggles are happening everywhere ordinary people fight together to protect and promote human dignity in their communities, at work, and before their governments.

We are determined to keep building powerful human rights movements in a beautiful, wild, beloved community around basic principles common to all.

Grounded in history and praxis.
Honest, critical, self-reflective.
Radically transformative.
Locally internationalist.

Insights

  • 1. A Big Tent for Inclusive Organizing

    Human Rights is a unifying framework capable of building connections across difference within a common vocabulary. We should use the power of human rights in every way we can to expand and strengthen collective action. We can build on-ramps with low barriers to entry for inviting in new people and communities while welcoming the ways in which a bigger, richer movement will be changed in the process.

  • 2. Struggles for Human Dignity are on the March

    While the challenges are profound and existential, defeatist narratives about Human Rights in free-fall are wrong. Human rights movements are highly active across the country and the globe doing things in novel ways that emerge from their contexts, generating models that deserve to be studied and replicated. An honest and constructive story of the moment must capture the creative, robust, and tenacious forms of human rights resistance actively building our new future. 

  • 3. Solidarity Financing

    Our movements operate within capitalist mandates and rely too heavily on philanthropy, which takes up outsized space and influence while serving as tax shelters for many of the same people, firms, and companies we target in our campaigns. Cooperative approaches - such as membership models, resource sharing, and redistribution - that challenge the competitive nature of civil society could wisely produce alternative economic forms that are both possible and necessary.

  • 4. Build Infrastructure

    Powerful movements need physical places to meet, commune, and rest, as well as proprietary and safe communication channels. We must develop sustainable plans for a network of municipal, regional and national assembly spaces in order to stay and feel connected to one another. Digital architecture is necessary for exchanging ideas, sharing information, and advancing narrative power.

  • 5. Freedom Needs Fighters

    We need to cultivate a base of support for Human Rights in the US by continuing and expanding popular education and organizing efforts. Students of all ages can be exposed to the basics of international law and norms, while opening up these processes as opportunities for local and individual sense-making and activism. Human Rights can provide a home for political belonging among fellow travelers, an adaptive container with certain contours that can also be reshaped from below. But learning and shared leadership is a two-way street: Young folks and people new to the movement bring fresh insights and a depth of knowledge that must inform the work. 

  • 6. Pass the Torch

    The legacy of Human Rights efforts in the United States must be included in our broader understanding of movements for social change in this country. Capturing the stories and strategies of our elders is essential for documenting our past and building a lifeline to future leaders and organizers. Intergenerational learning and mentorship are key to strengthening the roots that will sustain us.