WE ARE THE ADVOCACY ACADEMY
WHO WE ARE
The Advocacy Academy is an activist youth movement of leaders fighting for justice and equality. We serve as the political home for grassroots youth organising and the catalyst for collective action. Our Advocates’ lives have been directly shaped by living in an unjust world, and we exist to turn their anger into action.
We are young, dynamic, ambitious and unapologetic, and we are looking for someone to join us who is as passionate as we are about building the world as it should be.
WE ARE POWER HUNGRY
Young people have often been the catalysts for major social change, from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at the heart of the Civil Rights Movement, to the Soweto Uprising mobilising young people to resist the apartheid regime's education policies, to the Sunrise Movement redrawing the electoral map across America. How successfully they achieve real and lasting change depends on whether they are organised and whether they have the right strategy and tactics to be effective.
We would rather everyone acted altruistically, but in this world we get the justice we have the power to compel. The power our Movement is building is not about feeling ‘confident’ or ‘courageous’: power is the ability to act. There is a reason why powerless groups are encouraged to think of power as evil and corrupting - it keeps power in the hands of the people who already have it. We argue that powerlessness can be equally corrupting, as anyone who’s experienced it already knows.
WHAT WE DO
Our flagship programme, the Social Justice Leadership Fellowship, is an immersive six-month crash-course in social justice. Made up of three residential retreats and weekly evening gatherings, the Fellowship is delivered by an outstanding faculty of 250 expert change-makers from more than 50 partners - ranging from Sisters Uncut and the Black Cultural Archives to The New York Times and our patron Helen Hayes MP. Through 400 hours of experiential education and collective action our young Advocates learn to analyse the socio-political conditions in their communities, identify innovative solutions to the injustices they have experienced and build their power to bring about this change.
Every single decision at The Advocacy Academy is taken by our Advocates as part of a “cyclical leadership model”. After the Fellowship programme our young people continue to organise and grow with us, leading our programmes, working with our partner organisations and launching campaigns as members of the Movement. This year we are celebrating our seventh anniversary with 122 Alumni and our main focus going forward will be developing the pathways for their journeys beyond the Fellowship - the Movement Infrastructure. This year we have also launched a new entry into our Alumni with the five-day Spark programme, which will bring on a further forty young people through our programmes each year. While some of these graduates may go on to join the Fellowship, we envisage other joining our Alumni pool directly, making the pathways for different Alumni even more critical to understand, develop and communicate.
THE ADVOCATES' CHARTER
I. A better world is possible. There is nothing inevitable about injustice and inequality.
II. It is our right and our responsibility to build that world.
III. We strive to continually improve ourselves, our communities, and our society.
IV. The lives of ordinary people matter.
V. We are one community. We love and support one another and stand in solidarity with each other.
VI. It is our right to define ourselves, and have our identities celebrated.
VII. We actively work to uncover, acknowledge, and overcome our biases.
VIII. We value experience, and do not do for others what they can do for themselves. Nothing about us without us!
IX. We prize conviction, and support each other to live our values in our everyday lives.
X. We value critical thinking and challenge. We approach discomfort, disagreement and difficult conversations with an open and curious mind.
XI. We practice the powerful combination of education and action.
XII. We work to create inclusive and supportive spaces where we can each be our best selves.
APPLY
Join the Class of 2023
THE ADVOCATES
MORE THAN JUST DREAMERS
WE ARE RECRUITING!
We are growing our team - including new leadership roles, campaign coaches, honorary therapist and more!
We'll be hosting regular meet and greets for a chance to meet our staff team and our Alumni!THUR 30TH SEPT 6-7:30PM - Sign up hereFRI 8th OCT 12 - 1:30PM - Sign up hereFollow the link below to go to our recruitment site.
SUPPORT THE MOVEMENT
Your donations allow us to create this incredible community of social justice leaders.
education not exclusion + no lost causes
staff
Saba Shafi
Pronoun: she
CEO
Saba has an MBA from Wharton and eight years of management consultancy experience. She kicked-off her career leading healthcare initiatives in refugee camps and diversity and inclusion programmes in graduate schools in the US. Saba is passionate about growing TAA. She would also like to go into space, if anyone has a ticket.
Imane Maghrani
Pronoun: she
Associate Director Spark Programmes
Imane is a social justice educator who loves creating spaces where young people are heard, seen and supported to thrive. Starting her career in academia, she took a winding path through the private and non-profit sectors to learn that she loves nothing more than spending time surrounded by passionate young people (admittedly more than spending time with adults). She reads, writes and sings for pleasure, and her most important love language is fruit.
Darcey Williamson
Pronoun: she
Head of Cyclical Leadership
Darcey is a youth worker and informal educator whose practice is informed by a radical youth work paradigm. She employs critical education methods and participatory action research, working with others to co-create projects that challenge epistemic and social injustices. As the Head of Cyclical Leadership, Darcey leads our Changemaker Apprenticeship programme, training and supporting our Alumni community to develop their leadership practice and social justice education methods to become Changemakers, who are central to our movement.
Dhakshi Suriar
Pronoun: she
Head of Philanthropy
Dhakshi is an accidental activist (her words), with a huge passion for social justice. After a couple of stints in the finance sector, she moved across to non-profits working predominantly in trusts and foundations. She now oversees philanthropy at The Advocacy Academy bringing a breadth of partnership management experience with her. Dhakshi enjoys all things social commentary which probably explains why she loves a bit of everything. Talk to her about books, music, TV, podcasts, art, food, fashion and she'll want to unpick the socio-political contexts behind them all.
Fopé Olaleye
Pronoun: they
Political Education Lead
Fopé is an educator and writer, has a degree in politics, a short lived career in student politics and wealth of facilitation experience from Fearless Futures. They have travelled across the country delivering talks and workshops to universities and have only been stranded once. They are now the lead for Political Education and Campaigns at TAA which they are beyond excited to dig their teeth into as their work has always involved campaigning and critical thinking around education. Alongside this, Fopé is an avid buyer of books (and a more hesitant reader of said books). In their free time, they enjoy writing about identity, vulnerability, and intimacy.
Amarah Khan
Pronoun: she
Community Administrator
Amarah has a Masters Degree in Environmental Psychology. Starting her career in qualitative research, she uses evidence and insight to create fairer spaces. She is passionate about creating social and physical spaces that dare to have chutzpah and be unapologetically beautiful. You will often find Amarah naming every plant and giving them a detailed back story.
Lydia Rye
Pronouns: she/they
Campaigns & Organising Director
Lydia is an experienced community organiser and campaigner with more than a decade of experience in social purpose work. She is a former Senior Organiser for Citizens UK where she oversaw civil society alliances in West London, Nottingham & the Maun Valley and is proudest of her work with Nottingham Citizens to see misogyny recognised as a motivator for hate crime for the first time internationally - soon to be law. She is a trustee for the new feminist organising project Love & Power and a host for The Dinner Party, a peer led grief support group. In her spare time she tries to paint & regularly braces hypothermia at the local lido.
Alex & molly
Pronouns: she/they
Transformative Culture Advisors
Alex (she/they) and molly (she/they) are long time friends of TAA, having worked in various roles over the years. They are both students, researchers, and facilitators of transformative justice. molly’s background is in sexual violence support work and over the last five years she has focused her energies into transformative non-carceral approaches to harm. Alex specialised in RJ in schools, before moving to an explicit transformative and abolitionist framework for this work, they now collaborate with leaders in schools and non-profits to embed the values of transformative justice work at a structural level.
Shiden Tekle
Pronoun: he
Community Organiser
Shiden is an activist who graduated from the program in 2018. He has worked on campaigns such as Legally Black and The Halo Code and has won MTV EMA awards and a Marie Claire award from both campaigns. He studied Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London and loves to talk about the current political climate. He has been actively involved with the Advocacy Academy Changemakers program since 2018 and is passionate about community organising. He plays a couple of musical instruments, smiles a whole load and knows a lot about Marvel stuff!
Stephanie Cohen
Pronoun: she
Community Organiser
Stephanie has been a part of TAA for 6 years, graduating in 2015! Since, she has pursued her passions for changemaking, and social justice by gaining a Law and Masters of Laws in Legal and Political Theory from the University of York. In September 2020 she joined forces with some amazing alumni to form the Halo Collective, where she is the Legal and Political Organiser - solidifying her passion for racial justice and human rights! She likes to call herself a Legal academic having published her first article in June 2021 highlighting the importance of legally recognising hair discrimination as a form of racial discrimination. Outside of her passions for human rights and social justice, she plays a large, maybe unhealthy, amount of badminton. Some say she’s quite good, having played for her university's team for over 3 years.
Vanessa Castro
Pronoun: she
Community Organiser
Vanessa graduated from TAA in 2016, since then she has completed a BA in politics and international relations where she suffered the Canadian winters and ate lots of poutine during her year abroad. She has trained to become a young changemaker for the upcoming TAA fellowships with the amazing Darcey and participated in many fun, radical campaign actions whilst empowering and supporting the young advocates. She is co-organiser of Latinxcluded, a collective birthed from TAA who fight for the representation of the Latinx community in the UK. She has also had a taste of HR in the social care sector this past year. She is a proud pug mama and is always down for bubble tea.
Betty Pearl
Pronoun: she
Movement Leader
Betty is an alumni from the class of 2017 and has organised on campaigns such as Influuenzers and Education Not Exclusion. Through the latter campaign she was massively involved in the documentary Excluded, produced by human rights charity Each Other. She studied Politics and International Relations (the TAA alumni course) at the University of Nottingham, where she was the President of Feminists’ Society for a term. Over the past year she has been a part of the Involving Young People Collective for grant-making foundation Esmee Fairbairn. She is really excited to be continuing her love for justice work at The Advocacy Academy.
Mel Pinto
Pronoun: she
Movement Leader
Mel was born and raised in South London and recently completed her BA Hons in Politics and IR. She has campaigned with the academy for 4 years and was the leading liberation officer at university, where she quickly learned that she hates everything about our education system. She is incredibly passionate about a whole lot of things and could chat your ear off about how pretty much everything links to politics. She constantly leads with awareness around mental health because she went undiagnosed for a big part of her life and knows how it is to feel invisible. You will absolutely know she can sing, and if someone has a time-machine please hit her up because partying in the 80s sounds much better than now to Mel.
Ilhan Yonis
Pronoun: she
Movement Leader
Ilhan is one of the alumni from class of 2016/17. She has worked on the housing campaign, helping to secure funding and land to build affordable housing. She is also currently working as a lead organiser for the Halo Collective. Ilhan has had many media appearances including a feature on the cover of Dazed with Vivienne Westwood and her collaborative film 'Hijab and me,' which earned her a BAFTA nomination. Ilhan is a recent social anthropology graduate who spends her free time running around after her 6 younger siblings!
artist in residence
Rhianna Kemi (pronoun: she) is a playwright, facilitator and researcher. She has been working with The Advocacy Academy in various roles for several years now - organising the 2019 & 2021 alumni residentials, and changemaking for the Fellowship and Spark programmes. She has now found her place at TAA as Artist-in-Residence, where she facilitates arts partnerships and supports alumni-led creative projects. Rhianna is also Associate Artist at Coney, an award-winning interactive theatre company. She has recently completed her first play, and spends a lot of her time over-analysing the scripts and plot devices of various TV shows.
Eddie Pile (pronoun: they)
YOU'RE AWESOME, LET'S TALK.
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