The Academy of Democracy is a network of nearly 50 organizations – NGOs, schools, colleges, private firms, unions, local governments and public services. We work with process facilitation and design and we organize workshops, courses, college programs and practical projects in the fields of Democracy and Human Rights.
Our aims are to create tools for people to take charge over their own lives and common concerns; to question the existing order and discuss possible alternatives; to work for a deepened democracy and respect for Human Rights in all levels of society.
The Academy of Democracy was created in 1993 by Ordfront, an NGO with 30 000 individual members. Ordfront runs an independent publishing house and Sweden’s largest monthly magazine for social and cultural issues.
Briefly on our recent international projects:
The International Consultation on Education for Sustainable Development – process design: We designed the methodology for 3 successive days of parallel workshops for 350 people from 80 countries, working in 15-30 groups, including training of facilitators. The main achievements were outstanding ratings on participants’ experience of active participation and citizenship as well as overwhelming content output.
Bosnian-Swedish NGOs – organizational development: Two NGOs from Sweden and Bosnia had cooperated for 7 years and now faced a critical phase in their relationship, regarding roles and responsibilities. We facilitated an intense and 5 day long discussion between the two, including common identification and structuring of challenges and priorities as well as conflict resolution.
Swedish Forum on Human Rights: In November 2004, the third biannual Forum took place. More than 1000 participants discussed terrorism, trafficking, practical police work, parallel reports, human rights education, the right to health, non state actors, reconciliation and much more. This year’s main speakers were Vandana Shiva, Right Livelyhood Award Winner and Hans Blix, fomer UN Weapon’s Inspector for Iraq.
Democracy/Human Rights for development workers: We regularly contribute 1-2-day sessions of interactive workshops on democracy in theory and practice for future development workers. The sessions include democratic theory, participatory methods, case studies and self-reflections.
Gender, a democracy issue –for Central American youth organizations: An interactive, reflective democracy workshop, giving participants tools to analyze democratic gender dilemmas on all levels.
For more information, please send an e-mail to: info@demokratiakademin.se or call +46-8-462 44 77.