Jeff Unsicker is a Professor at SIT Graduate Institute in the Sustainable Development degree area. A member of the faculty since 1990, he has also served as a dean and interim president of SIT Graduate Institute.
The Graduate Admissions Office asked if I’d add a posting to this blog. I take it as an opportunity to help recruit more students whose experiences and commitments will lead them to the classes I and several faculty colleagues teach in the field of Policy Advocacy – a critically important subject that is almost never taught in colleges or universities.
Professor Jeff Unsicker: the field of Policy Advocacy, continued
In fact, I use every opportunity I get to recruit potential graduate students who want to learn (or learn more about) how to challenge and replace those social and economic policies of governments, corporations or other powerful institutions that are often among the root causes of poverty, hunger, racism, sexism, conflict and other social injustices!
Some of our best Policy Advocacy students arrive with no awareness that Policy Advocacy is even a field of practice. Others have worked for a number of years doing different types of advocacy work – ranging from grassroots organizing and popular education to policy research, media relations and lobbying.
All leave with a very practical set of analytic and professional skills that are in demand among a growing number of civil society organizations that do advocacy work, including local and international NGOs, faith-based organizations, labor unions, public interest groups, environmental organizations, and various citizen and professional associations.
While grounded in our Sustainable Development degree (which offers a concentration in Policy Analysis and Advocacy), many of the students in the Policy Advocacy classes are doing their degrees in Social Justice in Intercultural Relations, Conflict Transformation, and the self-designed Intercultural Service, Leadership and Management. In addition, students in International Education and Management often join them in one-week Policy Advocacy courses in Washington, DC (described below).
The courses I teach focus on advocacy campaigns and initiatives that seek to influence policies at all levels of government (national and local government structures, in the Global North and the South) and in international institutions such as the United Nations and the World Bank. They also examine the different strategies and tactics that are possible and culturally appropriate in different national contexts, ranging from relatively open democracies to closed political systems.
Given the international backgrounds of SIT students, I give special attention to complex advocacy campaigns that involve multiple countries and institutions – such as the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (SIT alumna Jody Williams shared the Nobel Peace Prize for her leadership in that advocacy) or the current initiatives focused on the plight of the people of Darfur in Sudan (which requires advocates to influence the Sudanese government through influencing the United Nations, the African Union, and many member states, especially China).
On the other hand, we also give substantial attention to local advocacy. One of our “living case studies” is the work I do with other community activists in Vermont to close an aging nuclear power plant and replace it with increased conservation, efficiency and use of renewable sources of energy. Through community education and building a coalition of many different interest groups throughout our small state, we have worked with our legislature to enact ground-breaking laws that are models for the rest of the country – taking back the power to decide the plant’s future from the its corporate owners and federal agencies dominated by the nuclear industry and giving it to the people of Vermont.
We are constantly reviewing and expanding our Policy Advocacy curriculum. Currently, there are two 3-credit courses that build on knowledge and skills developed through many different PIM courses. The first course provides a comprehensive introduction to policy advocacy and a set of core skills. Interested students can then take a more advanced course that goes into more depth on policy analysis and advocacy strategy.
There have also been several special “partner sections” of the first Policy Advocacy course in Lima, Peru (taught in Spanish) and Washington, DC that are offered to NGO workers and others living in those locations. Students in the on-campus course interact with those other students through “global assignments” completed online.
Next year we may offer another section of the Policy Advocacy course in Cochabamba, Bolivia – in an intensive format scheduled at a time in the academic year that allows on-campus students to travel there and participate.
Separately or in combination with those courses are a number of 1-credit intensive courses that take students to Washington, DC for a week to learn about advocacy work being done around a specific policy issue – in recent years those issues have been immigration, human trafficking, and the war on Iraq.
Many students do their professional practicums and capstone papers based on the Policy Advocacy courses. Spread out around the world, the students share experiences with faculty and each other through online communications.
As you can see, we’re quite serious about Policy Advocacy in PIM! If you think you may want to do advocacy work – as the focus of your career or as part of the work you do managing programs, doing community outreach, etc. – you are most welcome.
Jeff Unsicker holds a PhD and MA from Stanford University, as well as a BA from the University Of California in San Diego. His graduate studies were in international development, education, policy analysis, and administration. Jeff previously worked for a coalition of community-based organizations and an international liberal arts college in California and served as a research associate at the University of Dar Es Salaam (Tanzania) and a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Botswana. A cofounder and general secretary of the Global Partnership for NGO Studies, Education, and Training and former faculty member for a Salzburg Seminar (Austria), his teaching and research interests focus on global civil society, social justice, advocacy, and education for reflective practice.
Tags: Jeff Unsicker, Policy Advocacy
