About Advancement Project
Our Mission
Advancement Project is a policy, communications and legal action group committed to racial justice founded by a team of veteran civil rights lawyers in 1999. Advancement Project was created to develop and inspire community-based solutions based on the same high quality legal analysis and public education campaigns that produced the landmark civil rights victories of earlier eras. From Advancement Project's inception, we have worked "on-the-ground," helping organized communities of color dismantle and reform the unjust and inequitable policies that undermine the promise of democracy. Simultaneously, we have aggressively sought and seized opportunities to promote this approach to racial and social justice among our colleagues and allies in the organizing, legal, policy, and philanthropic communities.
Our mission is:
"To develop, encourage, and widely disseminate innovative ideas, and pioneer models that inspire and mobilize a broad national racial justice movement to achieve universal opportunity and a just democracy!"
Advancement Project partners with community organizations bringing them the tools of legal advocacy and strategic communications to dismantle structural exclusion. Advancement Project staff in Washington, DC is comprised of two Co-Directors, both leaders in the field of racial justice lawyering, as are our five senior attorneys who assist with program design and implementation; five staff attorneys, a Communications Department with three communications specialists, a development director, an operations manager and an administrative assistant. In addition, we have deployed three staff attorneys and six local voter protection advocates to the field in response to our Hurricane Katrina work and our voter protection work in New Jersey. As a result, our staff is accessible to our community partners throughout the country.
Our Theory of Change
A decade ago, Advancement Project's founding team of veteran civil rights lawyers believed that structural racism could begin to be dismantled by multi-racial grassroots organizing focused on changing public policies and supported by lawyers and communications strategies. The collective experience of Advancement Project's founders, as well as the conclusion of some of the most creative thinkers in the civil rights field, suggested that when this method of change is employed, it can have much greater resonance than policy advocacy, litigation, or organizing tend to have on their own. Yet racial justice efforts that incorporated this essential-and powerful-mix of lawyers, organizers, and communication experts rarely occurred.
To implement our theory of change, Advancement Project operates on two planes: locally, we provide direct, hands-on support for organized communities in their struggles for racial and social justice, providing legal and communications resources for on-the-ground efforts; nationally, we actively broaden and extend the practice of community-centered racial justice lawyering through training, networking, creation of tools and resources, media outreach and public education. We also operate a communications department that, in partnership with allies, uses sophisticated strategies to raise awareness of racial and social inequities and generate public will for progressive and systemic change.
We choose project activities, whether national or local, with the potential to build power at the grassroots level and to reframe and accelerate the quest for racial justice. Particularly in historically challenging arenas, such as educational equity and voting rights, we work with our allies to set the racial justice movement's public policy agenda.
