Influence

While CREA highly values policy and legal advocacy, we also aim to influence institutions like schools, village heads or leaders, community councils or boards, corporations, and multilateral agencies.

One of the benefits of working with different social movements is that CREA is able to analyze who is “in” or “out” of different movement conversations. With this perspective, CREA has the ability to scrutinize different claims to make sure that one movement’s articulation of their goals does not contradict or undermine the rights of another constituency.

With this in mind, CREA carefully and consciously selects the consortiums, boards and advisory groups in which staff actively participate. Working across movements, CREA believes that influencing movements to be more inclusive and rights-based is the role of all staff within the organization. In some cases, this includes selecting opportunities to insert a counter-discourse that challenges the claims or dominant frames of social movements.

CREA’s principles of engagement with partners extend to donors, and we actively strive to influence philanthropic policies and decline to work with funding bodies whose values or approaches undermine the rights of the most marginalized.