A Women’s Rights Approach To Advocacy Planning

The nature of advocacy work is always urgent, with many competing priorities, and often insufficient funding and resources. Organisations are required to be reactive, and strategic advocacy planning can fall to the wayside. Our women’s rights advocacy planning workshops can help your organisation be more strategic so your impact can achieve transformative and sustainable change.   

IWDA’s strategic advocacy planning methodology, Plan Your Power, was created through a co-design process with women’s rights organisations in partnership with Womenkind Worldwide.  

Plan Your Power is based on the following principles: 

• Recognises that building transformative power must be part of advocacy if change is to be sustainable
• Central to advocacy is understanding the various forms and locations of gendered power – and how gender and other discriminations intersect
• Methods are political, what language or strategies we use will themselves create or hinder change
• Advocacy must put first the priorities of women- recognising that they face intersecting discrimination

Workshop Details

• 3 or 5 day workshop options for up to 20 people
• Price starts at $11,370 for a group of up to 10

What does the workshop cover?  

The workshop will take your team through every stage of the advocacy planning process, using a number of analytical frameworks:  

• Different types and expressions of power, like power-over, power-with, power-within and power-under. 
• Feminist principles like intersectionality, challenging and redistributing power, the personal is political and non-violence.  
• The Gender at Work analytical framework which defines four spheres of transformative change within advocacy movements: Resources & Opportunities; Formal Rules and Policies; Consciousness & Capabilities; Informal Norms & Exclusionary Practices.    

Workshop outcomes 

• Your team will conclude the workshop with an advocacy strategy ready to implement, along with the right tools to help you monitor and evaluate your impact. 
• A strong understanding of how to identify the various forms and locations of gendered power – and how gender and other discriminations intersect 
• All staff will have a strong understanding of advocacy fundamentals with free access to the Plan Your Power Online Learning Course prior to the workshop.  

Who is this workshop for?   

This workshop is ideally suited to organisations, groups, teams or collectives who have an advocacy issue they want to progress.  

About the facilitators    

Clara Bradley is the Advocacy Advisor at IWDA. She started her career as a lawyer working in human rights law reform in Victoria before moving to the community development sector. She has over 10 years experience working in advocacy and facilitating consultations with communities and people with lived experience. She now works to support women’s rights organisations in Southeast Asia with their international advocacy work. 

Alice Ridge is the Senior Research, Policy & Advocacy Advisor at the International Women’s Development Agency. She works collaboratively with feminist movements in Australia and internationally to co-design advocacy strategies that get to the root causes of inequality and injustice. She has facilitated online workshops for over 200 people over the past 2 years, using a feminist futures-thinking methodology to explore possible feminist futures after COVID-19.