Elevating voices: Dignity through civic engagement

Lysa John is Secretary-General of CIVICUS and lives in South Africa. She has championed human rights and international mobilisation for two decades. She started her career working for grassroots organisations fighting to end urban poverty in India, and subsequently spearheaded trans-national campaigns calling for government accountability.

Before joining CIVICUS, she worked as Head of Outreach for the UN High-Level Panel that drafted the blueprint for the Sustainable Development Goals, and as Global Campaigns Director at Save the Children. These roles have shaped a deep interest in and understanding of grassroots-to-global activism, which continues to drive and inform her work. Lysa can be reached through her Linked-In page or  X (Twitter)handle: @lysajohnSA.

Home lays the foundation for a dignified existence. As a microcosm of society, it’s the place where the seeds of civic freedom and where change takes root. Dignity is built on being heard, seen and recognised; on being respected and able to speak and assemble freely; on the right to engage in public affairs and challenge inequality.

The journey to claiming individual freedoms is founded on our unwillingness to be treated unfairly in our homes, our schools and in the spaces where we work and interact with others.

Anyone who identifies as a woman or a member of the LGBTQIA+ community will understand this. The first fight for freedom is lost or won here. If you can’t live with dignity in your personal space, you’re unlikely to find your voice in public.

Mine was the first of a new generation of socially mobile Indian women able to define ‘success’ on our own terms. Much of what I have achieved in my lifetime is the result of my mother’s determination to change the social narrative that pressured women into giving up higher studies and career ambitions for responsibilities related to marriage and motherhood.

This quality in my mother represents what I believe to be the intrinsically human inter-generational movement for change. She gave me the best education – one that she could not afford – determined that I realise the dreams and ambitions she couldn’t. My life’s work is to continue her legacy of grassroots agency and mobilisation.

With a mere 3% of the world’s population living in countries which fully protect civic rights, it’s more important than ever that we speak up - quickly and loudly - when rights are eroded. Every voice counts, and it starts with every single one of us; in our families and in our homes. If the victims of human trafficking or domestic abuse can’t speak out, they are denied the possibility of change, of reaching out to groups who have the tools and resources to help them. They can’t bring public and political attention to their plight. And this applies equally to the victims of daily injustices and indignities – the child bullied at school; the woman harassed on the street.

If we accept partial rights for some, soon we will all face a higher level of restriction. Since 2018, the proportion of repressed countries has grown from around a fifth to nearly half. Leaders are testing the boundaries by increasing restrictions and seeing how populations react.

Even when the right to protest is under unprecedented attack, civil society continues to reinvent itself. Transformation comes when diverse and plural voices and experiences can come to the fore. Civil society lays the foundation of global citizenship and systems change, including on climate action, against corruption and on the mobilisation of gender and LGBTQI+ rights. My role at CIVICUS is to connect the two most powerful forces: the people protesting on the ground and the decision-makers.

In my experience, we instinctively know that a space where civic freedom is lost, no matter how far away, will ultimately impact us. I saw this so clearly when working on ‘Nine is Mine’, an activism campaign for 9% of India’s GDP to be spent on health and education. We sent blank postcards to school children across the country to have a direct conversation with political leaders by writing their messages on the postcards. Two weeks later, a postcard came back from an 8-year-old in a remote hill village in Himachal Pradesh. A boy who had never been outside his tiny hamlet had signed up to something that would benefit everybody in the country.

This was a turning point for me. I realised that people – even children – instinctively understand national global citizenship. This underpins the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals which reinforce that we all share the same issues. Through empathy and solidarity for people thousands of miles away, we save ourselves by building an inter-generational movement for change.

Representing civil society, I have worked with high-level politicians and heads of state. Decision-makers respond most strongly not to megatrends and macro issues but to the genuine stories told firsthand through the lens of lived experience. Human stories are what matter most, and this is why our ability to influence systems change requires elevating all voices.

I saw this so clearly in 2012 as head of outreach for the group that wrote the blueprint for the Sustainable Development Goals. I coordinated a stakeholder dialogue with the high-level panel co-chaired by then British Prime Minister David Cameron, President Yudhoyono of Indonesia and President Ellen Johnson of Liberia. In a room full of heads of state, senior ministers and political advisors, in walked community activists from Liberia. They spoke passionately about their personal struggles and challenges. I was in the room after that hearing and for the following three days when the fundamentals of the report were discussed. Every single panellist referred to the community activists’ testimony. It gave them a level of insight and empathy, helping them to visualise and articulate what they wanted to see from the report – in practical, real terms.

In my experience, there’s a profound realisation among civil society that the biggest supporters of their efforts are private foundations and philanthropies. They are championing the work that’s needed on fundamental issues like democracy and civic freedom and filling the gaps left by governments and organisations to resource the movement, the local struggles, the global connections and the transnational action that needs to happen on these issues. Our mission at CIVICUS is for these groups to influence more foundations and philanthropic organisations in the Global South to follow suit and help set the agenda for transformation and change that benefits our societies.

And are we amplifying the voices of the 97% of the world’s population whose voices are silenced and whose basic human rights are compromised? By extending empathy and solidarity for all people, even those thousands of miles away, and elevating their voices, we can create a world where human dignity and the ideals of democracy can flourish for everyone. My wish is for real voices to be heard across all societies, and this begins in our workplaces, our communities and our homes. Everything we wish to project out in the world, starts in the private sphere. It starts with conversations, with taking up space. Every journey towards system change begins here - with claiming dignity, the right to be heard, on a daily basis.