Last week marked the four-year anniversary of the launch of Equal Rights Institute. It’s been a busy year!

We spoke to 2,465 people in 29 speeches and one all-day seminar, representing a 17% increase in how many people we spoke to in the last year. (We rarely do seminars now that the course is out. Now we encourage groups to get the course and then consider flying one of us out for Q&A and roleplay exercises.)

We also published 25 new articles to our blog, a 92% increase from last year, which were read by 32,084 people, a 13% increase from last year. (And those analytics aren’t even accurate, given that due to a huge website error we just fixed, we’re missing two full months of data. Therefore the actual increase in readership is larger than what we’re seeing.)

Here are a few of my favorite memories from the last year:

Training the staff and volunteers of Denmark Right to Life to have better dialogues with pro-choice people.

Doing an amazing speaking event with David Bereit. We’ll be releasing the full audio on the ERI podcast in the coming weeks.

Meeting fantastic people at the Students for Life Conference in DC! A few of my favorite people we met below…

This is Emmet Dooley (below), who leads a group in Scotland and got our course last year. Here’s what he emailed us last month about the results: (Don’t miss his crazy high speaking numbers!)

We have had an amazing year and so much of that success is thanks to the resources from the Equal Rights Institute.

Since I met Equal Rights Institute in January 2017 at the Students for Life of America Conference I have had had the pleasure of delivering 10 different culture of life presentations, 112 separate times, in 30 different high schools, 5 primary and 4 universities across Scotland. The influence of your strategies cannot be highlighted enough as I proposed the culture of life to over 8,000 students (often just class sizes allowing greater interaction and debate).

This is John, who came by to tell me that he reformed his pro-life approach after I gently rebuked him five years ago for the way he spoke to pro-choice people on Twitter. John’s approach was to say that it’s “pro-life vs. pro-LIES.” John said that he felt appropriately humbled by my question about whether this would be effective, shut down the twitter account, and redirected his pro-life activities. John is now working with an atheist pro-life activist in San Francisco to help pro-life people to be effective activists. How cool is that?!

Recording Equipped for Life Podcast episodes with Rachel Crawford in studio now that she lives in Charlotte!

Nine speaking events plus a meeting with the Bishop in four days in Canada! (Not to mention seeing the Niagara Falls for the first time.)

Our staff outreach at Davidson College that resulted in several articles:

• Building Rapport with a Benevolent Dictator
• Circumventing Philosophy Hell: Keeping Your Conversations about Abortion Productive
• Don’t Dialogue Like Hamilton OR Aaron Burr
• Pay Attention to Who Should NOT Be in a Given Conversation

Speaking three times for StoneBridge Community Church’s pro-life group that took the Equipped for Life Course! You can listen to the audio from two Q&A sessions here and here.

It really has been an amazing year. As some of you know, the summer months can be financially hard on non-profit organizations. We need to raise an additional $3,300 per month to get into the office space and video studio that will allow our growing staff to work much more effectively, as well as making it possible for us to put out much more frequent video training content for pro-life advocates like you! Would you prayerfully consider making a one-time gift to help us reach our goal?

If you’re a monthly donor, THANK YOU! You’re the best. And would you consider increasing your support? We have big things we want to accomplish in the next few years, things that simply won’t happen unless our support increases. It only takes a few clicks for us to increase a monthly donation amount, so simply email me directly and let me know what you’d like to be giving monthly moving forward, and we’ll get it taken care of right away. Thank you so much!

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