Equal Rights Institute Turns Three

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Last month marked the three-year anniversary of the launch of Equal Rights Institute. It’s been a fantastic year.

We spoke to 4,250 people in 34 speeches and one all-day seminar. (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 13 new articles to our blog, which were read by 27,791 people, mainly visiting our site from America, Russia, Canada, the United Kingdom, India, and Australia!

To put those numbers in perspective, we gave about twice as many speeches and spoke to about twice as many people as we had the year before, while we cut our article publishing in more than half while finishing course production and moving. Thanks to our growth in other areas, our blog traffic per article has grown since the last year, so we didn’t see very much of a dip in blog traffic at all.

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

Releasing the Equipped for Life Course after six months of shooting, editing, and website building.

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Moving to Charlotte and getting our new office set up.

Giving two lectures at both of Students for Life’s national conferences.

Creating two podcasts with Tim. The Equipped for Life Podcast is a part of the course and is a long roundtable discussion format, while the public ERI Podcast has live speech and Q&A audio, ERI updates and audio versions of our articles.

Incoming staff person Rachel Crawford graduating and beginning her support raising process before her support letters even arrived! Our week with her this spring was awesome, where we did an outreach day, recorded seven podcast episodes, and did a lot of brainstorming on future projects.

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Speaking at FRC headquarters.

Publishing more sidewalk counseling training content from Jacob Nels. We’re now working on a new module for the Equipped for Life course on Jacob’s methods of sidewalk counseling that he has seen to be the most effective.

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Lastly, and I don’t have a good picture for this, but this year we finally hit my goal of bringing in monthly contributions that match or beat our monthly expenses! We’re in a healthy financial position without ever having done one fundraising event. I’m ridiculously grateful to our faithful supporters that have taken this journey with us. My fundraising goal is now to get to a place where it’s prudent for us to rent a medium-sized office as we grow our staff.

President

Josh Brahm is the President of Equal Rights Institute, an organization that trains pro-life advocates to think clearly, reason honestly and argue persuasively.

Josh has worked in the pro-life movement since he was 18. A sought-after speaker, Josh has spoken for more than 23,000 people in six countries and in 22 of the 50 states.

Josh’s primary passion is helping pro-life people to be more persuasive when they communicate with pro-choice people. That means ditching faulty rhetoric and tactics and embracing arguments that hold up under philosophical scrutiny.

He has publicly debated leaders from Planned Parenthood, the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), Georgians for Choice, and one of the leading abortion facilities in Atlanta.

Josh also wants to bring relational apologetics to the pro-life movement. “Some pro-choice people will not change their mind after one conversation on a college campus. Some of them will only change their mind after dozens of conversations with a person they trust in the context of friendship.”

Josh is formerly the host of a globally-heard podcast turned radio/TV show, Life Report. He now hosts the Equipped for Life Podcast. He’s also written dozens of articles for LifeNews.com and the ERI blog.

He directed the first 40 Days for Life campaign in Fresno, resulting in up to 60 lives saved.

Josh has been happily married to his wife, Hannah, for 15 years. They have three sons, Noah, William, and Eli. They live in Charlotte, North Carolina.

David Bereit, the National Director of 40 Days for Life, sums up Josh’s expertise this way: “Josh Brahm is one of the brightest, most articulate, and innovative people in the pro-life movement. His cutting-edge work is helping people think more clearly, communicate more effectively, and — most importantly — be better ambassadors for Christ. I wholeheartedly endorse Josh’s work, and I encourage you to join me in following Josh and getting involved in his work today!”

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