Fabi Fugazza, a lauded leader in the nonprofit world, serves as both a human rights lawyer and Co-Executive Director of the Italian Coalition for Civil Liberties and Rights (CILD), a Rome-based organization dedicated to protecting rights and liberties through advocacy, public education, and legal action. She is also an award-winning academic at the University of Sydney and Western Sydney University, where she teaches human rights law, business law, and public policy. Her widespread work tackles massive projects and data that have high-stakes implications when not properly facilitated, which brought her to Harvard Kennedy School’s (HKS) Executive Education program Leading Successful Programs: Using Evidence to Assess Effectiveness.
Fabi enrolled in Leading Successful Programs with a goal of examining her initiatives that address human rights violations, particularly for marginalized communities, to ensure that they would run effectively. She explained, “In the nonprofit world you often don’t have budget to waste, so you want to make sure you are squeezing the most impact out of every dollar spent. To do this, you need to know the ins and outs of assessing effectiveness of programs through impact data measurement.”
Through immersing herself in the program, she was able to bring her organization’s challenges into focus and craft tangible solutions. “This program is invaluable because it is designed to confront specific, real-world challenges, and targets those issues with the help of the expert faculty, but also your fellow classmates who are, like you, senior executives in organizations that seek to achieve similar objectives,” she said. “You can take away strategies and tactics that you know can work for your organization’s context, reliably.”
Since attending the program, Fabi has achieved two significant professional milestones that she was working towards: leading a human rights organization and publishing a book. “I was able to reach a career goal, which was to lead a human rights organization that worked to assist marginalized communities,” she said. “Now in co-leading CILD, based in Rome, I have been able to work directly on human rights issues I care deeply about.”
As she began to work on her book, Fabi was inspired by part of the curriculum from Leading Successful Programs. “The focus that the program placed on data also led me to look deeper into an area that I always had an interest in: unconscious bias. This led me to write a book on it, and share knowledge on a topic I think deserves wider attention, as it really is the core basis of many human rights abuses, as well as a reason why many communities remain marginalized.” Her book, Born to be (Unconsciously) Biased: Strategies to Unbias Your Business Decision Making, provides practical strategies to minimize bias in decision-making processes, helping organizations optimize outcomes.
In addition to the influence the program had on her book, Fabi also uses the tools she gained in her work at CILD, both in daily practices, as well as larger scale frameworks. “The program helped me construct methods and devices that would allow me to collect data and properly assess the initiatives I have led and measure their impact,” she said. “At CILD, we have implemented robust monitoring and evaluation frameworks to assess the effectiveness of our legal interventions, advocacy campaigns, and capacity-building efforts. This data-driven approach has strengthened our ability to communicate with stakeholders, secure funding, and maximize outcomes for the communities we serve. Additionally, the program enhanced my ability to identify potential weaknesses in initiatives and ask critical questions to ensure the solutions we implement are effective and sustainable.”
Her program’s cohort also proved to be an enormous asset to her work’s critical mission. “My network is now wider. The program provides an opportunity for you to network with people who work in nonprofits around the world,” she said. “This can create lasting connections which serve as a sounding board for projects.”
Fabi’s nonprofit and legal career continues to highlight and propel forward her lifelong mission to create a better world for those in disadvantaged communities, and she’s prepared to stay strong in the face of headwinds. “My goal is to continue creating meaningful impact in the lives of marginalized communities and to challenge governments to better address pressing humanitarian issues,” she said. “A forthcoming challenge is to counter the growing trend of disregarding evidence and truth in public discourse. The skills and knowledge from my Harvard Kennedy School experience will be instrumental in promoting evidence-based approaches and the role of evidence in discourse and reinforcing the importance of truth in policy-making and leadership.”