Call for Applications: Defenders’ Wellbeing Collective

HRI’s Human Rights Resilience Project, in partnership with The Wellbeing Project, is launching its Defenders’ Wellbeing Collective—a unique space for leaders of grassroots, community, and survivor-led human rights organizations or movements globally to reflect, experiment, share, and learn together about how best to support greater well-being and resilience within their organizations and movements.

Social justice and human rights advocates often face stress and trauma, but frequently lack tools to support resilience at the individual, organizational, and movement levels. These stressors can be amplified among the leaders of grassroots, community, and survivor-led human rights groups. Often, such leaders are grappling with significant trauma themselves while trying to advocate for their own rights, as well as the rights of their communities. Despite these challenges, many community-based organizations are also at the forefront of advancing and innovating well-being practices within their movements, and across the human rights field.

The Wellbeing Defenders Collective will serve as an environment for reflection, innovation, and honest exchanges, in which human rights leaders can have the flexibility to learn, make mistakes, iterate, and deepen their inner well-being and organizational practices in dialogue with each other.

The application to join the Wellbeing Defenders Collective is open for leaders and advocates from grassroots, community, and survivor-led human rights groups or movements. Apply to join us here, by September 20. More information on the Collective is available here.  

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The Human Rights Resilience Project is a consortium of human rights advocates and mental health experts who seek to contribute to efforts to build more resilient activists and movements. The members of the project are based at the Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute, the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University’s School of Law, and at the Department of Psychology at the New School for Social Research. We conduct research into mental health, promote awareness of well-being issues in human rights, provide trainings and mentoring to activists and organizations around the world, and support the development of a global community of practice engaged in collective learning about resilience.