Susan Hoechstetter

Senior Advisor for Foundation Advocacy Initiative and Advocacy Evaluation and Planning

Before joining Alliance for Justice, Sue led the National Association of Social Workers' government relations effort for 13 years, helping them to develop a powerful role influencing federal policy.  She joined Alliance for Justice in 1998 to promote foundation support for nonprofit advocacy as a way to amplify citizen's voices in the policy process.  AFJ's 2008 booklet, Words to Give By, containing excerpts from Sue's 23 interviews with leading advocacy funders, demonstrates the progress towards informed advocacy grantmaking that this AFJ work has helped bring about.  In addition to directing the foundation advocacy training and technical assistance program at AFJ, Sue has developed an approach to evaluating advocacy which appears in the 2004 publication, Investing in Change: A Funder's Guide to Supporting Advocacy.  She worked with The George Gund Foundation and Mosiaca to produce tools implementing that approach, Build Your Advocacy Grantmaking: Advocacy Evaluation and Advocacy Capacity Assessment Tools, and in 2008 led the development of a recognized framework for evaluating community organizing.