Susan Hoechstetter

Senior Advisor for Foundation Advocacy Initiative and Advocacy Evaluation and Planning

Sue develops programs and reaches out to funders to help them find ways to comfortably and effectively support advocacy, and links them to tools, events, and trainings and other resources. She leads the production and updating of advocacy capacity and evaluation tools and community organizing evaluation tools. A longtime employee, Sue joined Alliance for Justice in 1998 to 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 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. Currently she is testing the 2012 updated version of AFJ’s capacity assessment tool.

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.

Sue holds a M.S.W. from the University of Pittsburgh and a B.A. in Sociology and Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh.