Healthy organisational practices are key to delivering our human rights change.
2013, the International Council of Amnesty decided to create the Core Standards. The Core Standards exist to fortify organisational health across all Amnesty entities, including the Secretariat. After 10 years, given so many changes in the external environment and internal landscape of Amnesty, the Core standards have undergone a review and update in consultation with the Movement. In 2022, the Global Assembly decided to integrate the core standards within an accountability framework and introduce clarity on what minimum and additional indicators of success are for each of the standards. A working group of entities and Secretariat representatives have helped to finalise the updated standards and self-assessment process. A pilot of the updated standards assessment has been launched in July 2023. The Core Standards are divided into the following four categories within the larger accountability framework:
The standards are written as a description of a fully compliant entity and, compliance to the minimum criteria is mandatory subject only to the caveat that in instances where implementation of a Core Standard would conflict with local law, an Amnesty International entity should implement that Core Standard to the nearest extent possible. The objective of the Core Standards is to reflect on our entities organisational health and make plans for strengthening each category through assessment, discussion of results and learning and taking decisions on priority areas. For that, the Movement Building team offers guidance and capacity building across all regions.
The updated Core Standards are a self-assessment that takes place every other year and the overall results are reported on the Movement Impact Report to the Global Assembly. Each national entity Board is responsible for ensuring that the self-assessment is completed in due time; however, this work should be jointly undertaken by the Board and the Director, and it will of course be necessary to consult with staff in order to get the necessary answers and evidence to support your answers.
Meeting the Core Standards will enable us to strengthen our belonging to “One Amnesty”, to be accountable to each other, and to promote good governance to ensure that we strive to increase our human rights impact and enhance growth. Please see the documents on the updated process to learn more.
If you have not received the online self-assessment survey link for completion in 2023, please email core.standards@amnesty .org
The focal point for the core standards in each entity such as the entity’s director and board chair should become familiar with the updated set of standards and indicators (in the Annex) and go through the guidelines and survey questions before attempting to complete the survey. Login credentials for the entity’s survey will be sent to all national entity directors. There is only one survey entry expected from each entity. Relevant stakeholders within the entity will need to be engaged in the self-assessment process as much as the entity has capacity to do so. A focal point person should ensure all the answers are collated for ease of online completion. In order to collate the answers, the entity may wish to hold reflection meetings or workshop with different stakeholders.
We recommend that at least the Board Chair of the entity should meet to discuss the survey questions along with either the director or nominated focal point for the core standards. The following clusters of the standards should involve all the Board members: Governance and Leadership area. Organisational Health should ideally also involve Board members but perhaps a nominated person such as the chair could fulfil this role but it should definitely involve the director and relevant staff who handle different organisational policies covered under this area. The Finance and Growth cluster of standards should involve a nominated Board member such as Treasurer and the relevant management staff such as director or Head of finance where relevant. Please see more
While parts of the survey could be completed by different people, there will be only one login per entity and it is important that the entity keep their login secure and use only those credentials and have a way to coordinate and collate the information from the different stakeholders. This is especially relevant for the larger entities where many of the organisational functions are distributed to more roles.
A. There is a welcome page with important information on the process and output
B. There are some minimum demographic information on the entity that needs to be completed and confirmed.
C. The survey is organised around the three clusters of Governance and Leadership; Finance and Growth and Organisational Health. Under these clusters, there are principles and standards and against these are their indicator statements. The entity will need to assess themselves on a scale of 1-3 against each of the indicator statements.
D. The indicators against each of the standards are organised as MUST HAVE (minimum requirements) and where relevant GOOD TO HAVE statements and questions against which you are asked to rate the level of implementation for that particular statement. An explanation of what each of the 1-3 rating means is explained at the top of each of the survey questions for easy reference.
The ratings are as below:
E. At the end of the survey, we ask for feedback on the updated standards and assessment form, what should we keep and what needs further improvement. Your feedback on the experience will really help us to make further improvements.
⦁ The IS will coordinate with Agenda Consulting (who are implementing the survey) to provide individual, regional and global reports. For global reporting all the results of the entities, including the IS will be shared. There will be information available by region, globally, by funding status and entity size. There will be contextual information collated for identifying what are the key gaps and what areas entities are doing well in. These will be discussed at Global Assembly and Regional Forums in 2024. If we are failing in some critical areas of compliance we need to discuss these openly and act-the data will help us make informed decisions.
⦁ Feedback meetings arranged with entities. The results will be discussed with each entity by either the IS focal point or through regional calls and help to develop any follow-up recommendations and action plans.
⦁ The movement building programme plans to use the results as a baseline to develop more in-depth workshops in 2024 on the critical areas identified in the core standards which will serve the purpose of training, diving deeper into the assessment and exchanging knowledge with peers. These will help develop capacity but will also help us discuss how to improve on failures and exchange practices.
⦁ An online induction and training module will also be developed to support new board members and directors on the core standards in 2024.
⦁ The self-assessment process for 2025 will be amended based on the feedback from 2023.
⦁ Deadline for submission: 31 DECEMBER 2023
⦁ We suggest that participatory workshops or meetings could be organised around each cluster of standards for the board members and relevant staff to go through together and reflect on where the entity is with regards to each of the standards and which areas have had the most lessons and learning and which areas need more attention in the future against each of the standard. There are open ended questions that can help to facilitate discussion.
There are many ways that the reflection could be organised and it is not necessary that all 3 clusters are completed at the same time. They can be completed on an ongoing basis over the next few months. What would be important is to ensure that the information is saved as it is being collected. There are different methodologies that can facilitate conversations in groups, whether at a board or management meeting.
Some examples of questions to explore are:
⦁ In light of the assessment questions, what needs to continue, improve or stop?
⦁ In light of the assessment questions, what does this mean for us, what do we do now and in the future?
⦁ If we could only allot 10% of our time to these standards, which areas are the most critical to address and why?
Some Do’s and one Don’t!
