When Steven Hawkins was hired to head Amnesty International USA two years ago, he didn’t have time to bask in the Nobel Prize-winning organization’s reputation. He had a crisis on his hands.
The U.S. branch was hemorrhaging members, its finances were frayed, and its staff was on edge after running through three executive directors in three years.
What’s more, a generational battle brewed among the human-rights group’s members. Many of its old guard felt the nonprofit should continue to focus on fighting abuses abroad, even after anger among young Americans erupted over violent police tactics in places like Baltimore, New York, and Ferguson, Mo.
Mr. Hawkins quickly went to work on several fronts.
Among other efforts to improve the group’s bottom line, he cut millions of dollars in expenses by renegotiating Amnesty’s real-estate leases and expanded its revenue by boosting online fundraising.
At the same time, he worked to persuade Amnesty’s board that the nonprofit should “bring human rights home” by rallying Americans to battle rights abuses in their own backyard.
Says the nonprofit leader, “We have to change the dynamic so people here see their rights as human rights so they can fight for them.”
By doing so, he told the board, Amnesty USA could draw in new members while making them more empathetic to the human-rights struggles of people in other countries.
So far, so good, observers say. Mr. Hawkins has stabilized the group’s once free-falling finances. He has also has turned around a decline in membership, re-energized the organization’s staff, and offered it the prospect of steady leadership after a period of turnover.
“He walked into a situation that included a lot of attrition and the rising of a youth movement within our ranks,” says Kathleen Cavanaugh, an Amnesty USA board member. “He’s gotten people excited about our work again.”
Under Mr. Hawkins, Amnesty USA has reached a watershed moment, say other nonprofit leaders, including Christopher Stone, president of the Open Society Foundations, the only large grant maker that supports the organization.
Says Mr. Stone, “There is risk in what he is doing, but that’s what makes this time so exciting and so important for Amnesty.”
Heading to the Streets
In the past year or so, Mr. Hawkins’s emphasis on domestic causes has brought yellow-shirted Amnesty USA staff monitors and volunteers to the streets of Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo., documenting whether police have infringed on protesters’ rights. Such actions have raised the group’s profile and helped highlight abuses.
“Our work on police violence has brought in a lot of new members,” says Rafia Zakaria, a lawyer and activist who until recently served on Amnesty’s board. “The challenge those new members pose is that they are passionate and want the organization to change.”
Mr. Hawkins has met his share of resistance, both from new members and from long-timers. Traditionally, only longtime members have debated organizational issues at Amnesty USA’s annual meetings. Often they are uncomfortable with efforts to take those debates to the streets or to reach out to members in the ways young people prefer — on their phones via social media.
Many veteran members have been uneasy as Mr. Hawkins has broadened Amnesty’s mission, but he is undeterred. “There are individuals within Amnesty who believe we’re becoming too domestically focused,” he says.” I don’t expect to win everyone over, but as long as I can expand the pie and increase our level of support, I’ll be taking the organization in the right direction, and not just financially.”
Unlikely Mentors
Calm, slight, and with a lawyer’s measured way of speaking, Mr. Hawkins projects a quietness that belies a rabble-rouser from rough beginnings.
He first got involved with rights organizations as a vulnerable teenager from a fatherless home in Ossining, N.Y. A neighbor saw him running with a tough crowd and introduced him to an NAACP-led youth group she had organized.
Mr. Hawkins grew up a few blocks from the Sing Sing Correctional Facility. “I’d walk to school and hear prisoners speaking on the other side of that 13-foot wall,” he recalls. That proximity, coupled with a prison chapter that the NAACP developed there, gave him an appreciation of the lives of the incarcerated.
He joined a prison-outreach team. “The prisoners gave me a summer reading list, which included The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” Mr. Hawkins recalls. “To be able to discuss that with people who knew Malcolm personally was extraordinary.”
His jailed mentors steered the young man away from street life and toward an activist’s sense of purpose in the greater world.
“They wanted to instill some direction, some focus in my life,” he says. “They were there when I applied to college.”
He went to Harvard to study economics: “When I went away to school, we wrote letters to each other.”
Finding a Crusade
After getting his law degree at New York University — and spending a year working for human rights in Zimbabwe — he embarked on a crusade of many years to end the death penalty in the United States.
At the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, he inherited several death-penalty cases from a departing colleague: Deval Patrick, later the governor of Massachusetts. Though many associates told Mr. Hawkins that pushing to end capital punishment was quixotic, he immediately saw the value of the work.
He spent 14 years fighting capital punishment in and out of the courtroom, doubling down on his commitment to the cause by leading the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
“I realized that litigation wasn’t going to be enough,” he says. “The kind of change I needed to see dealt with changing people’s hearts and minds. I could see that the death penalty was being misapplied to juveniles and people with mental disabilities. We decided to attack the issue from those angles.”
He worked to attract public sympathy for the cause, collaborating with community groups and other rights coalitions. He won cases involving juveniles in Arkansas and Louisiana. “The cases I won were won because we organized people. We got people mad,” says Mr. Hawkins.
Such a strategy wasn’t always popular with the board of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
“Half the board resigned,” says Benjamin Todd Jealous, the former president of the NAACP, who worked with Mr. Hawkins there and at the National Coalition.
“Many thought it had to be an all-or-nothing win, with a Supreme Court decision overturning all of it. But that wasn’t a reasonable expectation,” says Mr. Jealous. “Now, because of what Steven set in motion, the death penalty has been abolished for juveniles and the mentally challenged and has been outlawed in several states and the District of Columbia.”
A Youth Movement
When Mr. Hawkins joined the NAACP in 2004 to serve as Mr. Jealous’s executive vice president, they worked especially hard to increase the graying civil-rights group’s appeal to younger supporters, especially through social media. Its membership grew 9 percent from 2008 to 2013, reversing a downward trend. In 2012, the organization raised $1 million online for the first time in its history.
Mr. Hawkins is making a similar push at Amnesty USA to reach young people where they get their information — on their computers and mobile devices. The group now boasts 1.5 million Twitter followers, about double what the number was when Mr. Hawkins took charge.
Along the way, he sought to boost the diversity of the organization’s supporters.
“One criticism of Amnesty is that it has been very white and middle class,” says Ms. Zakaria, the former board member. “We have to appeal to more than our traditional donor base. One of our biggest handicaps has been integrating minorities into our membership.”
One of the ways Mr. Hawkins hopes to boost diversity is through more partnerships with like-minded organizations.
“I’d like to build bridges between groups fighting what’s happening here, such as zero-tolerance policing, with groups in other parts of the world who are fighting the same things,” says Mr. Hawkins.
The Next Fight
But before building that bridge, Mr. Hawkins has had to rework Amnesty’s nuts and bolts.
To improve the nonprofit’s finances, he renegotiated the lease of its offices in New York and Washington as well as an annual payment the U.S. chapter makes to the international organization, saving the group millions of dollars.
By moving away from the group’s longtime fundraising method — direct mail — and toward on-street canvassing and outreach to sign up dues-paying members, the group has brought in more young people and first-timers, ramping up Amnesty USA’s membership to 155,000 — 14,000 above 2014 levels. (The group, which accepts no contributions from corporations, received $26 million of its $33 million in donations last year from individuals.)
And although it was forced to close Amnesty offices in some U.S. cities during the recession, the organization has increased its staff by about 20 percent in the past two years.
Expanding the types of issues Amnesty USA deals with could also help expand its appeal, Mr. Hawkins believes. Confronting income inequality will affect how the organization is perceived, and not just in America.
“Traditionalists say the job of rights organizations is to worry about people everywhere else,” says Mr. Jealous, now a partner in Kapor Capital, a social-venture firm. “What they fail to realize is that people abroad will be more influenced if we’re minding our own house.”
But along with many veteran Amnesty USA members, some academics have questioned whether nonprofits can make a dent in something as pervasive and deep-rooted as income inequality.
“On the profound structural issues, I wouldn’t be optimistic about the efforts of human-rights groups,” says Samuel Moyn, a professor of law and history at the Harvard Law School and author of The Last Utopia, a book about rights organizations.
“Human-rights groups use shame to change behavior. There’s no reason to think that a shaming strategy would change structural issues like income inequality. There are a lot of people who want inequality to exist. It’s going to be hard to build a movement around that.”
Traditional Goals Plus ‘My Own Thing’
Those who have followed Mr. Hawkins’s career, though, wouldn’t bet against him.
Citing Mr. Hawkins’s work to abolish the death penalty, Mr. Jealous notes that the Amnesty leader’s pattern is to “develop a strategy that some won’t accept at first but that becomes the strategy everyone embraces eventually.”
One of the group’s supporters sees reason for Amnesty USA to meet the economic issue head-on.
“There has to be some limit on inequality,” says Mr. Stone, of Open Society Foundations. “Steve knows there’s a point where people will say they don’t recognize this country anymore.”
Mr. Hawkins insists that Amnesty USA will continue working in its traditional areas, fighting rights abuses in the United States and abroad. Those areas include issues that sprouted up after the 2001 terror attacks, such as detention of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, mass surveillance, the militarization of police departments, and torture.
In addition to keeping an eye on all those concerns, he has embarked on what he calls Amnesty USA 2040 — “my own thing,” he says — to figure out what the organization might look like 25 years from now.
In his vision, it will be larger, financially stronger, and more vital to the lives of those fighting for rights around the nation.
And yet the nature of the work will remain the same.
“Battles are won and lost, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that there’s always a battle,” he says. “That never ends.”
Note: This article has been corrected to say that members of the board of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, not the NAACP board, resigned to protest Mr. Hawkins’s activism against capital punishment.
