Advocates for Human Rights
April 1, 2026
Amount Requested$35,000.00
330 2nd Ave S Suite 800
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
Rosalyn Park
Women’s Rights Director
- Engender Dignity, Respect and Equality
Program Support
The mission of The Advocates for Human Rights is to implement international human rights standards to promote civil society and reinforce the rule of law. By involving volunteers in research, education, and advocacy, we build broad constituencies in Minnesota, the Upper Midwest, and selected global communities.
$35,000.00
$750,000.00
$4,911,155.00
Yes
The Advocates requests support for our work to support women and girls who are victims of violence and discrimination in Minesota and the Upper Midwest. We are addressing discrimination against women and girls by ensuring better protections for victims of domestic violence in the court system, through training and advocacy, direct services, and education. Our program advances the goals of the Olseth Family Foundation to ensure dignity, respect, and equality for women, and to ending violence against women by ensuring that the courts can protect victims of domestic violence, pushing back against gender-based discrimination and attempts to derail women’s rights, and services for vulnerable women and girls. Funds will support three primary focus areas, in addition to providing responsive funding allowing us to address equity priorities as they may arise in the coming year:
WATCH Court Monitoring Program. Our WATCH program is working to protect the human rights of survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and sex trafficking. Over the last year, with support from partners like you, we have re-designed our monitoring program to center the experiences of victims, and to focus on addressing trauma in the court system.
We use court observation, in which trained volunteers and staff observe a sampling of misdemeanor and felony arraignments, general criminal dockets in Hennepin County involving women and non-binary survivors, and immigration detention cases, along with court records research; interviews of civil society, and system actors to understand stakeholder awareness and attitudes toward trauma-informed courts and criminalized survivors; and interviews with impacted survivors, to capture gaps and trends in how courts protect or fail to protect victims.
Legal Support for Victims: Funds will also help us provide free legal assistance to human trafficking migrant victims in the Upper Midwest, build the capacity of pro bono lawyers to represent low-income survivors needing legal representation in immigration matters, and provide training and resources for systems professionals involved in identifying and combating trafficking in persons.
Addressing Backlash to Human Rights: The Advocates documents the coordinated rollbacks and attacks on human rights, including gender-based protections and works with coalition partners to raise awareness of these efforts and to combat them. For instance, we have documented how civil society responded to Operation Metro Surge, and producing a guide for rights organizations based on these findings.
Matching Gift: Finally, the funds help us inspire support from individuals who attend our house parties by offering a matching gift, which has helped us to increase giving successfully over the last year.
Women and girl victims of violence and human trafficking and criminalized survivors of Violence Against Women (VAW)
Trafficking legal aid: Upper Midwest; WATCH: Hennepin & Washington Counties; trafficking: statewide
Goal 1: Our goals for WATCH court observation is to increase awareness of the incidence of traumatization and criminalization of survivors of gender-based violence in the criminal and immigration courts; increase awareness of specific policies, practices, and procedures impacting survivors of gender-based violence in the courts, and identify and recommend changes in relevant polices, practices and procedures impacting survivors of gender-based violence in the courts.
Goal 2: Our goal for legal support for victims is to ensure that all survivors of human trafficking who need access to legal services either receive services from The Advocates, in the cases of immigration legal services, or are connected with partner services. In addition, we aim to provide needed training for legal system stakeholders on best practices for serving victims of human trafficking as requested.
Goal 3: Our goals for our rights support is to continue to strengthen partnerships among advocates, organizers, and civil society organizations to counter efforts to undermine human rights and gender-based rights. We aim to increase our partnerships, expand our trainings, and continue awareness raising efforts.
Goal 1: The Advocates will continue our monitoring process for the jury selection system, using our review, records research and interview process to assess how the current process and practices can contribute to traumatization of victims and criminalization of victims. We will also continue to train volunteers and engage survivors in the court monitoring process to inform best practices for observation.
Goal 2: We will continue to provide direct legal services for victims of human trafficking without legal immigration status in partnership with pro bono attorneys. Advocates staff provide training and support for partner attorneys, who in turn are able to provide services to a larger number of victims than Advocates’ attorneys are able to serve alone. In addition, we will coordinate with other legal service providers throughout Minnesota through The Hub, our statewide model for shared intake and referrals, to connect victims to other legal and social services as needed. In addition, we will provide responsive training on best practices for serving victims of trafficking as requested to state partners.
Goal 3: We will continue our efforts to document positive advocacy tactics, tools, and movements to counter anti-rights campaigns. This includes our work to document the movement in response to Operation Metro surge, and our ongoing civil society partnerships to support women’s rights organizations.
Include qualitative and quantitative measurements that show the impact of the program or organization.
Goal 1: Progress will be measured by the number of presentations and other awareness raising events to share information from our report, the rollout of our jury selection observation process, as well as altered courtroom practices that reflect trauma-informed approaches and enhanced understanding by community stakeholders of the experiences of criminalized survivors of violence against women. Progress will also be measured by increased numbers of survivors feeling safe, heard and treated with dignity when interacting with legal systems – a measurement we will gauge from our communications with partners and consultations with survivors.
Goal 2: We will measure progress using quantitative measures such as number of victims provided legal services, number of pro bono attorneys trained, and number of victims connected to community resources or other service providers. We will also monitor feedback from clients about quality and impact of services.
Goal 3: Progress will be measured using both quantitative and qualitative measures. In terms of quantitative measures, we will measure the number of partnerships strengthened, number of awareness raising events and campaigns, number of reports issued, and reach of reports. In qualitative measures, we will monitor feedback from partners on how effective collaboration was and on the impact of reporting.
09/01/2026
08/31/2027
We work with a wide range of stakeholders, including court personnel and justice system actors working on anti-trafficking, community partner organizations who can help identify and connect victims of trafficking to our legal services, and survivors and survivor-serving organizations. We also continue our advocacy and awareness raising work with a wide range of local and national partners to raise attention to how attacks on the rights of women and survivors of gender based violence in the U.S. are connected to global trends.
Ongoing
Unapproved