Access Now defends and extends the digital rights of users at risk around the world
HERE’S HOW
Helpline
Our 24/7 Digital Security Helpline provides comprehensive, real-time technical assistance to users at risk, including civil society groups, activists, journalists, and human rights defenders. Via our Helpline offices in Tunis, Manila, and Costa Rica, we work closely with global partners to empower local initiatives and strengthen coordination on threat reporting and rapid-response cases.
Policy
We seek to serve, guide, and influence decision makers across sectors through human rights-focused thought leadership and innovative, evidence-based policy analysis. As a global team with staff across the world, we work with local and regional partners to strengthen human rights protections from national capitals to the grassroots, and to effect real-time policy victories and long-term systemic change.
Advocacy
We leverage innovative campaign tactics, bold visual advocacy, and global partnerships with civil society, journalists, technologists, and beyond. We educate, petition, and appeal to decision makers in the halls of parliaments and corporate boardrooms, deliver digital security resources to users at risk, and mobilize global internet users to pressure the powerful.
Grants
We provide flexible and grantee-driven funding to grassroots organizations and activist groups that are working with users and communities most at risk of digital rights violations. We take an intersectional approach, as we recognize that threats to digital rights are compounded when they intersect with other human rights abuses or discrimination based on ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, class, and other means of marginalization.
RightsCon
RightsCon is our headline event convening thousands of experts from around the globe and across stakeholder lines. More than an annual conference, RightsCon is a movement that connects and mobilizes a global community between events to collaborate on the most pressing issues at the intersection of human rights and technology.
Legal
We strategically engage courts and legal processes to hold governments and companies accountable and to uphold fundamental rights in the digital age. This includes submitting interventions, amicus briefs, and expert opinions in state-level, regional, and international proceedings, and providing consistent, high-quality legal support to partners and Digital Security Helpline clients.
We mobilize on five issue areas
We've come a long way
But we can't do it alone
Here’s Our Global Team Today
From Costa Rica, to Tunis, to New York, Access Now has grown a diverse team of 60+ staff members across 13 countries. We are legally registered in Belgium, Costa Rica, Tunisia, and the United States, while supporting staff, fellows, and other personnel in Argentina, Australia, Germany, India, Kenya, Peru, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, and beyond.
Meet the team
Thanks To Our Board
Andrew Cohen
Treasurer
Andrew McLaughlin
President
Arzu Geybulla
Board Member
Brett Solomon
Executive Director
Bruce Schneier
Board Member
Donna McKay
Board Member
Emna Mizouni
Board Member
Marietje Schaake
Board Member
Yvette Alberdingk-Thijm
Board Member
The Access Now Board is composed of individuals from around the world who provide high level governance, guidance, and strategic oversight to the organization’s vision and its mission. They do not determine Access Now’s operational program or policy positions, are subject to a conflict of interest policy as well as our code of conduct, and are free to hold personal positions and roles that may not always align with the organization.