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WITNESS

Brooklyn, New York

Grants

2021 (3 years)
$900,000

WITNESS is a global nonprofit based in New York City with nearly three decades of experience training activists and citizens around the world to use video and technology to expose human rights abuses and seek redress. It works with individuals and citizen groups in more than 100 countries, and it has built trusted networks with grassroots communities, journalists, lawyers, and movement organizations to conduct its work. In the United States, WITNESS operates an expanding program to train citizen groups to use video and participatory media to document and address civil rights violations, such as police brutality and violence against immigrants and LGBTQ communities. Since its inception, WITNESS has been a leader in developing new technology tools to advance human and civil rights, and it has led efforts to protect the rights and safety of citizen groups and human rights activists on the social web. This grant provides general operating support for WITNESS to continue training citizen groups in the United States and globally, deepen connections between domestic and global citizen groups working on similar issues, and step up its efforts to hold the large technology platforms accountable for their role in facilitating human rights abuses and undermining democracy. Its goal is to equip citizens, activists and others in the United States and around the globe to use video and the social web to demand redress for civil and human rights violations, spark policy debates, and challenge unfair or inaccurate media accounts or official narratives.

2019 ( 4 months)
$25,000

WITNESS is a global nonprofit that trains and supports activists and citizens around the world to use video and technology to expose human rights abuses and seek social change. The award will support the launch of a new report focused on threats posed by synthetic media and deepfakes and related outreach around the report.

2018 (3 years)
$1,050,000

WITNESS is a global nonprofit based in New York City with 26 years of experience training and supporting activists and citizens around the world to use video and technology to expose human rights abuses and seek social change. It works with individuals and citizen groups in more than 100 countries, and has built trusted networks with grassroots communities, journalists, lawyers, and technology platforms. In the United States, WITNESS operates an expanding program to train citizen groups to use video and participatory media to document and address civil rights violations, such as police brutality and violence against immigrants and LGBTQ communities. This grant provides general operating support for WITNESS to continue its work globally, with a special emphasis on growing its presence in the United States. Its goal is to equip citizens, activists and others in the United States and around the globe to use video and social media to demand redress for civil and human rights violations, spark policy debates, and challenge unfair or inaccurate media accounts or official narratives.

2018 ( 7 months)
$10,000

X-Grant to support an expert meeting to explore pragmatic solutions to prevent and defend against fabricated video and audio generated by artificial intelligence technologies.

2016 (2 years)
$500,000

WITNESS is a nonprofit based in New York City that trains and supports activists and citizens around the world to use video and social media to expose human rights abuses and seek social change. In the United States WITNESS is launching efforts to equip organizations and individuals to use video and social media better to address a range of contemporary civil rights issues, including police violence, racial justice, and LGBTQ rights. This grant provides support for WITNESS to strengthen the capacity of key actors working on these issue areas, including leading service organizations, at-risk populations, emerging leaders and activists within movements, and ordinary citizens to use video more effectively and safely to collect evidence, spark policy debates, and challenge mainstream media accounts or official narratives. 

2015 (3 years)
$450,000

WITNESS helps enable human rights defenders to use video to expose the truth and create change. With long-standing expertise at the intersection of human rights, media, and technology, WITNESS has a unique vantage point on the breadth of opportunities and challenges facing the video-for-change movement. The award supports the organization’s technology advocacy work, which has two areas of focus. First, WITNESS influences leading technology companies to ensure the policies and code they write advances safety, privacy, and freedom of expression, while also improving the potential for their products and platforms to improve human rights monitoring and documentation. Second, WITNESS advances the development of specific technologies that improve the collection of human rights evidence captured through video.

2013 (2 years)
$300,000

WITNESS partners with human rights advocates around the globe to use the power of video and storytelling in order to expose human rights abuses and advance justice for crimes that are committed. The grant supports the organization’s Camera’s Everywhere program that is creating new tools that aid in documenting and preserving video evidence of human rights abuses, and advocating for leading technology companies to implement policies and practices that create a more enabling environment for human rights work in the digital world, particularly as it relates to gathering and documenting video evidence.