Overview of Americans for Informed Democracy
Americans for Informed Democracy is a non-partisan, non-profit organization that empowers young global leaders to “bring the world home” to their peers and the broader public. We seek to inspire young people to take up today’s global challenges -- such as climate change, poverty, AIDS, terrorism and violent conflict -- as the special mission of their generation.
Our network includes more than 20,000 young leaders on over 1,000 university campuses, as well as several thousand young professionals in hundreds of cities. We offer leadership training and financial support that equip these young people with the skills and resources they need to engage their communities in international discussions and campaigns.
Americans for Informed Democracy is dedicated to building a principled and collaborative vision for U.S. global engagement and to shaping effective international institutions that are appropriate for our increasingly interconnected world. We see young leaders as the changemakers who can realize our vision. Young people have the optimism and global perspective to imagine a world where countries work together to end poverty, stop climate change, and eliminate terror. We seek to harness the unique energy and insight of young people to bring the world home to Americans and to showcase the opportunities for the U.S. to work with the international community to address global challenges that no nation alone can solve alone.
Our Strategy
Americans for Informed Democracy offers an innovative approach to engaging the next generation of leaders in global education and advocacy. We host weekend summits that educate young leaders about the interconnectedness of our world, connect these leaders with global experts and campaigns, and provide them with a comprehensive package of leadership and messaging guides that train them to be effective organizers and advocates in their communities. We then support these empowered leaders as they coordinate local campaigns and host town hall forums and videoconferences that connect their communities to global issues.
The diagram below displays how our strategy builds the movement for responsible U.S. global engagement. A young person initially decides to attend one of our summits because she is curious to learn more about an international issue. Our summit then empowers her by educating her about the interconnectedness of our world, connecting her to a global campaign, and introducing her to likeminded peers from her own community. She then goes back to her community as part of a team of young leaders with the skills, resources, and connections to bring the world home to her peers and the broader public. With our support, she now works with a team of her peers to organize an educational event and a local campaign in her community. Using our town hall organizer’s guide and global videoconferencing network, she sets up an engaging forum to educate her community on a pressing global issue. She then draws on our campaign toolkits to build a local coalition and connects that coalition to a global campaign.
Model: AID's Theory of Change
Our strategy for engagement also moves alongside a generational preference for concrete, community-based action that works through local systems to promote global change. Students today pressure their campuses to buy fair trade products and become more environmentally friendly and self-sustaining. Our approach to youth activism moves alongside this generational trend. We focus on how students can take positive action through education and action in their local community.
A specific example may help to clarify our strategy and its successful outcomes. Kevin Taylor, a student at Duke University, came to a weekend summit focused on the international environment, where he learned about climate change and how his community of Durham, NC, could take local action to help stop global warming. During the summit, Kevin met environmental advocates who were trying to convince city governments to sign on to the Urban Environmental Accords, a United Nations backed document that details a seven year plan for making local communities more environmentally sustainable. Kevin then returned to his community with our event planning guide, coalition building toolkit, and a list of contacts of others at Duke. He set up an educational event, built a local coalition, and then worked with both community leaders and leaders from the Urban Environmental Accords movement to successfully convince his city government to sign on to the Accords. City leaders were not even familiar with the Accords in March of 2006 when Kevin first approached them, and now Durham is part of a network of over 90 cities worldwide working together to take local action on improving the environment for future generations. Kevin’s story is a common one in our network. Similar success stories by our young leaders include convincing their city government to sign on the ONE Campaign declaration and helping persuade their university to divest from Sudan.
Our History
Americans for Informed Democracy was founded by a group of American students who studied abroad just after the September 11th attacks. The students were traumatized by 9-11 and wary of being overseas so soon after the tragedy. But to their surprise, they were met with intense sympathy and solidarity from people from around the world. For them, the tragedy seemed to reveal the possibility for a global community of shared values.
But when these young Americans came back to the U.S., they were often greeted with questions about why people around the world hated America and our values. The students realized that the picture of the rest of the world that Americans were seeing in the media was very different from the experience of the world that they were living abroad. The media presented only the extremists and the threats from around the world. Americans did not have the chance to see the moderates around the world or the global partners that the U.S. could work with to overcome common threats such as climate change, terrorism, and disease.
These students set up Americans for Informed Democracy to bring the world home to Americans and to showcase the opportunities for the U.S. to play a more collaborative role in the world. They began hosting town hall forums and videoconferences to bring the stories of the world that they saw and experienced to their peers and the broader public. Based on their own experiences abroad, they believed that if Americans had new ways to connect with the rest of the world, they would see new opportunities for the U.S. to work with other countries to solve global problems. In other words, they sought to inspire a more informed democracy.
Our Accomplishments
Americans for Informed Democracy has grown quickly, attracting diverse student audiences, prominent NGO partners, and local, national and international media attention because it fills a niche in foreign policy and youth activism. When we began four years ago, there were many youth-led organizations devoted to specific global causes, but there was not yet an organization connecting young people across issue areas to build a coordinated movement for a principled and collaborative U.S. role in the world. We filled this void in the youth movement and are now the premiere institution through which more than 15,000 young people connect with one another, global campaigns, and the broader public.
Since 2002, our central organization has hosted more than 100 young global leaders summits in over 30 U.S. states and in five foreign countries to engage young leaders from Bob Jones University to Berkeley in our mission. We have then supported these leaders after they returned to their communities to host more than 1,000 town hall forums, over 200 global videoconferences and hundreds of local campaigns.
Our organization has received recognition from highly regarded media and global institutions. Our work has appeared in more than 500 media outlets from sources that cover politics and global affairs such as the New York Times, C-SPAN, BBC, Voice of America, CNN, and the Washington Post to more unexpected sources such as Marie Claire and the Montel Williams Show. Numerous editorial boards have praised our programs, including the Boston Globe, which called our Hope not Hate series “a victory of knowledge and inquiry over fear and blind pledges of revenge. This is public pressure at its noble best, able to cut through the haze of politics, inertia, and fear...” We received the 2005 Award for International Understanding from Search for Common Ground and were specially recognized by Madeleine Albright at the closing plenary session of the 2006 Clinton Global Initiative for our commitment to connecting young Americans with their peers worldwide. We have also been invited to present on our organization at the United Nations, Associated Press, World Bank, U.S. House, and U.S. Senate.
Perhaps our greatest accomplishment has been empowering the young leaders in our network to realize their own potential. Our leaders have joined Peace Corps and Teach for America, been accepted to top graduate programs at Princeton and Columbia, and received fellowships, such as the Marshall Scholarship and Fulbright. And we are not just empowering those who already have connections to become more connected—we are also bringing new students with great potential into leadership networks. As an example, we have written letters of recommendations to help exceptional leaders of our network who were at community colleges get into Yale and Harvard Universities. To date, we have written more than one hundred letters of recommendation for our leaders, overwhelmingly for students at state universities and community colleges.
Measuring Our Success
Although our goal of inspiring a generation and shaping a new vision for U.S. foreign policy is not easy to measure, we do use several indicators to measure our success. have These indicators are crucial in assessing the impact of our programming and thus how we revise and reprioritize our programming. Broadly speaking, we look at three indicators: the educational quality of our programs, the quantity and diversity of people we impact, and the number of people that take follow up action. Each of these indicators is then broken down into numerous criteria.
We judge the educational quality of our programming based on event evaluations, an annual membership survey, and a comprehensive review of our media coverage. We ask participants after each of our major events to rate the event’s effectiveness in giving them new insights on the topic presented and clear guidance on how they can take constructive action. We also ask our members once a year to rate the overall effectiveness of our programming and areas where we can improve in terms of both content and strategic vision. We have received very high ratings in our evaluations and, more importantly, we have consistently improved in our ratings over time, suggesting that we are learning from our mistakes.
We also use media coverage to assess the educational quality of our events. Through our organizing guides, speakers’ networks, and educational briefs, we work hard to ensure that our events communicate the importance of collaborative U.S. global engagement. We assess our news clips to see if this message comes through in media coverage. Since most of the journalists who cover our events are city or campus editors and non-experts on global issues, our belief is that if the reporter came away with a message of cooperative U.S. engagement, the audience has likely gotten this message as well. Of the 508 articles written about our organization’s work to date, we believe more than 450 present a clear, positive message for a cooperative and principled U.S. role in the world.
A second indicator of our success is the number and diversity of the people we reach. Through our online conference registration and event follow up reports, we know that more than 10,000 young leaders have attended our conferences and we estimate that over 100,000 young leaders have attended one of our events. Our websites (www.aidemocracy.org and www.globalscholar.org) average over 1,500 hits every day and several news stories are written about our group’s work in an average week. We also know that the vast network we are reaching is a diverse one. We have leaders in every state and especially high concentrations of members and events in the U.S. Southeast and Midwest. Our membership surveys indicate that two-thirds of our members are female and estimates from our conferences suggest that we have a disproportionately high level of participation among minorities, as compared to the general student population.
A final indicator of success is the concrete action that students take to follow up on our educational programs. We have a campaign associated with each of our program areas. We measure our success in mobilizing young people to action by seeing whether they take this follow up step. As you will see in the program descriptions that follow, we have been very successful in moving students beyond dialogue to constructive action. We have convinced numerous city governments to sign on to the Urban Environmental Accords, engaged thousands of students in the ONE Campaign, and convinced hundreds of students from more than twenty states to fundraise to help end malaria.
Our Program Areas
We work in seven program areas to inspire young global leaders to take positive action and to build a new consensus for the future of the U.S. role in the world:
- Global Environment
- Global Development
- Global Health
- U.S.-Muslim World Relations
- Human Rights and International Law
- Global Education
- Social Entrepreneurship
In each of our program areas, we have both an educational and an advocacy component. We work closely with literally hundreds of partners and campaigns to connect our student leaders with the latest ideas and movements in the NGO community. Partners provide speakers and educational briefs for our events and they offer professional development opportunities for our young leaders. They also shape the vision and content for our programming and link our activities at the grassroots level to policy advocacy. In addition to working with individual partners, we are a part of more than a dozen collaborative campaigns that allow our young leaders to take positive action as part of broader movement. In the program descriptions that follow, we feature a handful of these partners and campaigns.
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