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Home  About Us
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About WITNESS |
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WHO WE ARE
Mission: WITNESS (www.witness.org) uses video to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations. WITNESS empowers people to transform personal stories of abuse into powerful tools for justice, promoting public engagement and policy change.
Vision: WITNESS envisions a just, equitable world in which all individuals and communities are able to defend and uphold their human rights.
Learn more about WITNESS’ new strategic vision.
WHAT WE DO
Advocate
Core Partner Program: WITNESS partners with 12-15 human rights organizations for a period of one to three years to train and support the organization to use video as an integral tool within a campaign.  The goal of the partnership is to foster a campaign-specific relationship, designed to create high visibility and impact. WITNESS invites groups to apply to this program on a rolling basis and new partners are selected carefully, based on the strength of their human rights work, clarity of their advocacy focus and the ability of video to enhance their campaigns. WITNESS videos have been used as evidence in domestic and international courts, to complement official reports on human rights abuses, as a resource for news broadcasts, and to promote grassroots education and mobilization.
Learn more about Core Partner Program.
Train
Seeding Video Advocacy Program:
Due to the great demand for training in our methodology of video incorporation, WITNESS created short-term trainings for networks of human rights defenders along with materials and methods to ‘seed’ best practices in video advocacy around the globe. Specifically, WITNESS offers the Video Advocacy Institute, an immersive short term training course focusing on experiential learning through skills exercises, dialogue and case studies. Learn more about our various training intiatives.
Connect
The Hub: The Hub is an online destination and a global channel for human rights, where anyone anywhere with access to the internet can upload, view, share, and connect with others around media that can serve as a catalyst for social action. Click here to get involved
Preserve
WITNESS Media Archive: The WITNESS Media Archive collects, documents, preserves and provides access to audiovisual human rights media in support of advocacy, prosecution of justice, truth-telling, and as an historical record. The video collection comprises over 3,000 hours of video from human rights defenders around the world.
HOW WE STARTED
 The story of WITNESS is one of both vision and evolution. It began in 1988, the year musician and activist Peter Gabriel traveled with Amnesty International ’s Human Rights Now! Tour. Peter brought along a Sony Handycam, one of the first small camcorders marketed to consumers, to record the stories he heard. In 1991, a bystander captured on videotape the brutal beating of Rodney King, Jr. by Los Angeles police. The footage, flashed on TV screens around the globe, initiated an international conversation about police brutality and racial discrimination. Those images demonstrated the immense power of video to capture the world’s attention and viscerally communicate human rights abuses.
With the momentum generated by reactions to the King video, Peter was able to realize his visionary idea of putting film at the forefront of human rights campaigns. With a one million dollar seed grant from the Reebok Human Rights Foundation and a partnership with the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (now Human Rights First ), WITNESS was born in 1992, becoming an independent nonprofit organization in 2001. WITNESS has since trained and partnered with hundreds of human rights activists to utilize video in their respective campaigns, In 2007, in recognition of the ubiquity of camera-enabled mobile phones and the potential for anyone to become a witness to abuse and atrocity, WITNESS launched the Hub , an online human rights video sharing community.
WITNESS has worked in over 70 countries to advance human rights through the use of video for change. Today, WITNESS has a staff of 32 and a $4.9 million budget.
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