About
Our Vision
We envision a just world where everyone is treated with dignity, everyone’s human needs are met, and everyone can thrive and reach their full potential. We can build this world together by addressing the harms of the past, ensuring people have a meaningful role in the decisions that shape their lives, and sharing resources equitably based on people’s needs.
To realize this vision, Partners for Dignity & Rights supports struggles led by people most impacted by inequality, inequity and injustice. Together we pursue meaningful changes that directly improve people’s lives now, and we lay the groundwork for transformational change by building a movement for human rights.
Our Objectives
Strengthening Public Goods
We advance universal public systems, including housing, health care, education and social protection.
Advancing Equity and Justice
We dismantle systemic oppression, exploitation and discrimination to create inclusive systems, policies and practices that ensure the full realization of economic and social rights for all.
Building Power
We support communities and workers in creating collective action and organizing for participatory and accountable systems that ensure human rights and deepen democracy.
Our Mission
In partnership with communities, Partners for Dignity & Rights works to build a broad movement for economic and social rights, including health, housing, education and work with dignity. Based on the principle that fundamental human needs create human rights obligations on the part of the government and private sector, Partners for Dignity & Rights advocates for public policies that guarantee the universal and equitable fulfillment of these rights in the United States.
Our History
Over our history, Partners for Dignity & Rights (formerly known as National Economic and Social Rights Initiative) has worked deeply in partnership with community organizations across the country and helped found and anchor both the national Dignity in Schools Campaign now in 27 states and the Worker-Driven Social Responsibility Network. Through these relationships we have been part of groundbreaking victories stopping the criminalization of Black and brown youth in schools and creating restorative justice alternatives, securing public financing for community land trusts, creating seminal programs governed by workers to enforce human rights in the workplace, and advancing universal healthcare campaigns in multiple states. This wealth of work culminates in our New Social Contract project that offers a community driven vision as an alternative to the current landscape of injustice we are all working to change.
