A TRANENT resident has helped launch Scotland’s first charity dedicated to educating community groups on their human rights.

Clare MacGillivray, previously a Scotland committee member with the Equality and Human Rights Commission, is now interim CEO of the new group, Making Rights Real.

Clare, who won an International Association for Community Development global community development ambassador award last year, spent 2020 working on a scoping study for the new charity.

She said: “I’ve been working in human rights and community development for about six years, so when I left my last job I went to the [grant maker] Baring Foundation, in England, and said that we needed resources to scope out a new organisation in Scotland, which would support communities to use the power of human rights.”

Making Rights Real came out of a project run by the Scottish Human Rights Commission, which supported residents in Leith to use a human rights-based approach to access £2.3 million of council investment into housing improvements.

Clare said: “We’ve had brilliant support from a whole range of organisations in a Scottish advisory group, like the University of Glasgow, the Scottish Human Rights Commission, PPR [an organisation in Belfast that has been doing such work for 15 years] and others.

“At the end of the scoping study, we set up Making Rights Real.

“We got funding from the Corra Foundation, Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and the Baring Foundation to kickstart the work in Scotland.”

The new charity, based in Edinburgh, will now liaise with grassroots organisations and charities to enable them to work in a “human rights-based way” and to hold authorities to account for human rights issues or failures.

Clare said: “A lot of those will be in relation to things like poverty, housing, access to education or, for trans people, access to healthcare.

“There are loads and loads of human rights issues which have been compounded by Covid.

“This work is about empowerment of people; it’s around providing people with the capacity to hold authorities to account.”

A community conversation held in March last year, before the Covid lockdown, as part of Making Rights Real’s scoping study, saw about 30 people from statutory organisations, and students at Ross High School and the Scottish Children’s Parliament, gather for a meeting in Fa’side, which was attended by Anastasia Crickley, former chairwoman of the UN committee on the elimination of racial discrimination.

Clare, who lives in Tranent with her husband and three children, aged 20, 18 and 15, added: “We were talking about what are the main human rights issues here in East Lothian; and whether there was interest in taking forward a human rights-based approach.

“On the back of that there was a bit of interest but, obviously, because of Covid that’s put things on the backburner.

“But those are some of the conversations I’ll be picking up now that I’m in post.”

And Clare emphasised the impact of Covid on human rights issues, “especially in relation to economic, social and cultural rights”.

She added: “Poverty, the right to food, the right to adequate housing, homelessness, the right to digital inclusion – we’ve seen children who are not able to access online learning. How has that been responded to? How do people in social care access the right to healthcare?

“A spotlight is now being shone on those issues, which means we have an incredible opportunity to build forward better – I don’t like saying ‘build back better’ because what we had before was rubbish.

“If we’ve got this pot of money for public services, how do we make sure that the rights of the most marginalised are put at the centre?”

See twitter.com/Rights_Real for more information.