Updates on what is going on at Equal Rights Institute.
We’re thinking about creating a free ERI video/audio podcast that would be different from our Equipped for Life Course podcast (where we record our roundtable discussions and interviews).
We created this quick survey to gauge interest in this before we invest too much time into producing it. We’d really appreciate it if you could take a minute and fill it out.
We have exciting news to share for pro-life high school and college clubs! As many of you know, ERI published the Equipped for Life Course last year. It’s designed to help pro-life clubs get trained in dialogue skills and the most persuasive pro-life arguments so they can change more minds and save more lives during their outreaches.
If you haven’t heard about the positive impact the course had on the University of Michigan club, you can check out their report here. (Short version: Their most timid members were begging for weekly outreaches after only completing the first two modules of the course!)
For those of you who are overwhelmed by the thought of fundraising, there is now another way you can get the course. ERI president Josh Brahm spent the last several months asking our donors to pay for scholarships so some pro-life clubs could take the course without spending a dime. We’ve already given six scholarships away, and as of today we still have the funds left for 68 scholarships!
If you’re interested in getting the Equipped for Life course for free, and you’re willing to commit to getting your club through the course and doing at least one outreach within three months, go to EqualRightsInstitute.com/Apply and fill out the quick application.
Do you know of a club that may be interested in this offer? Please send them a link to this offer! This course can really help a club change more minds about abortion and save more lives, and if they apply soon enough, they can get the course without spending a dime!
It has been a transformative year at Equal Rights Institute.
In our second full year as an organization we gave 27 speeches in Illinois, California, Missouri, Massachusetts, Michigan, Virginia, Colorado, North Carolina, Texas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Wisconsin, New York, and Washington, DC! Thanks to some great logistical planning from Jacob Nels, we also did five full-day seminars in California, Michigan, and Virginia. All in all we trained approximately 1,377 people!
It’s easy to think of these people as statistics. We have gotten fantastic responses from the students we have spoken to. Here’s just one testimonial from Anthony Jones, the Vice President of Robinson Rams for Life, a high school Students for Life club that I spoke to recently while in the DC area:
Mr. Brahm brought clarity, enthusiasm, and a fresh perspective to our club in regards to the pro-life position. Although some of us had previous experience in defending life, the presentation enhanced everyone’s knowledge and gave us greater confidence to dialogue persuasively. Students came into the event with varying beliefs about abortion, but they all left with the common knowledge of a logical and charitable approach that championed equal rights. Once Mr. Brahm had concluded, one student exclaimed: ‘That was the best pro-life argument I’ve ever heard,’ already confirming that the presentation had made a tangible difference in equipping our club to accomplish its mission more effectively than ever before.
I created this list using the Google Analytics for the ERI blog, instead of complicating the process by incorporating stats from LifeNews.com, where many of our articles are later republished.
Our blog received 42,500 unique pageviews from more than 22,000 unique people this year. That’s a 46% decrease in pageviews from last year, which is entirely unsurprising to us, as we purposefully deprioritized writing blog posts this last year while we wrote and edited the Equipped for Life Course, increased our speaking trips, and moved our office across the country. As a comparison, in 2016 we only published 12 articles when we had published 40 articles in 2016! Regular blog posts will be a priority again in 2017, and I fully expect our numbers to jump back up as a result.
On to the list!
#5: Why We Need Male Sidewalk Counselors
Ever since I hired Jacob Nels in 2014, not long after launching ERI, I’ve told him that I want him to continue to occasionally sidewalk counsel. After hearing a lot of what Jacob has to say about the subject, I’ve come to believe that Jacob has come up with some very helpful techniques that would be helpful to other sidewalk counselors. Expect to see more articles and eventually a video addition to the Equipped for Life Course on sidewalk counseling tips. Until then you can hear Jacob share some of his tips in episodes 11 and 12 of the Equipped for Life podcast, both of which will come out this January.
The Equipped for Life course has only been out for about four months, but we’re already getting a sense for how it’s helping the people who’ve taken it.
My favorite bit of feedback we’ve received is from Rachel Crawford, the president of the University of Michigan Students for Life group. (Full disclosure, Rachel is also coming on staff next year, so she’s not unbiased, but her students are.)
One of the main concerns Tim and I had while creating this course was that people would take it, but wouldn’t then do the next step of talking to pro-choice people in their lives or during campus outreaches. What has happened with Rachel’s club gives me some hope that that’s not going to be a common problem.
This is how Rachel recently described the impact of the course on her club during an interview for the Equipped for Life podcast:
This was my students’ first exposure to Equal Rights Institute. They’re unanimously coming back to me and enthusiastically requesting we have more outreaches.
We went out and did outreach all day on a Saturday recently. Even the shy and quiet students, after watching some of the course or completing the entire course, were coming up to me saying, “I’m really quiet and I didn’t know if I was gonna be able to have a conversation today. But I totally stepped out of my comfort zone, and I totally gave it a try, and oh my gosh, I’m so happy I did! Can we do this next week?”
All of these students were super-excited. And we had the fortunate ability to have this outreach in the fall semester. We’ve had about 30 new students joining our club this year. The new students are telling me that “the dialogue tactics are helping me understand the proper mood and tone of the conversation. They’re making me feel more confident about opening a dialogue because I’ve learned about body language or learned about asking more clarification questions.”
Then the more experienced students are like, “I’ve been reading apologetics books all through high school and I’m super-excited.” Those students are really refreshed by the materials and the actual content of the more advanced parts of the course.
