About Civic Courage

Civic Courage, originally named the Center for Citizen Empowerment and Transformation, was founded to empower citizen action. We do that by teaching strategies to organizations so that their members can create champions in Congress and the media for their cause. Our work is grounded in breakthroughs, enrollment, building deep relationships, and transformation. “After dedicating 15 years of my life to RESULTS and about the same to the Microcredit Summit Campaign it felt like it was time to look to what was next,” Daley-Harris said in 2011. “So I asked myself this question, ‘What have I done that lights me up the most and yet is least adopted, least realized in the world?’ It was obvious that was my work to create structures of support that would allow citizens to create champions in the media and in Congress for the end of poverty, cleaning up the environment, building local economies and forwarding peace. I want to bring the best of the work we initiated at RESULTS to other organizations through Civic Courage.” Civic Courage, which works with the leadership of organizations to build these structures of support, launched in 2012.

RESULTS has become known for its creative strategies for empowering grassroots citizen action. In 1987 RESULTS volunteers were able to gather editorial writers from 28 U.S. cities on a conference call with Muhammad Yunus, 19 years before he received the Nobel Peace Prize. Twenty years after that conference call Prof. Yunus said:

“From that day in 1987 when RESULTS arranged for me to talk by conference call to editorial writers in dozens of US cities, to the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, no other organization has done more to put Grameen Bank on the map than RESULTS and RESULTS Educational Fund’s Microcredit Summit Campaign. More importantly, no other organization has been as critical a partner in seeing to it that microcredit is used as a tool to eradicate poverty and empower women than RESULTS and RESULTS Educational Fund’s Microcredit Summit Campaign.”

Sam Daley-Harris, CEO and Founder
In 1980 Sam Daley-Harris founded RESULTS, a citizen lobby committed to creating the political will to end hunger and the worst aspects of poverty, and RESULTS Educational Fund, an organization focused on creating the will to end hunger and the worst aspects of poverty. Daley-Harris also co-founded the Microcredit Summit Campaign in 1995 with FINCA founder John Hatch and Nobel Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus.

Daley-Harris led in organizing the February 1997 Microcredit Summit held in Washington, DC. The Summit was attended by more than 2,900 delegates from 137 countries and launched a campaign to reach 100 million of the world’s poorest families, especially the women of those families, with credit for self-employment and other financial and business services by 2005. At that first Summit then-US First Lady Hillary Clinton said, “I am thrilled to see such a turnout for this Summit which is one of the most important gatherings we could have anywhere in our world.” Under Daley-Harris’ leadership the Microcredit Summit Campaign goal of reaching 100 million of the world’s poorest families was surpassed in 2007.

“It is important to realize that when RESULTS started lobbying on child survival issues in 1984 UNICEF estimated that 41,000 children died every day from largely preventable malnutrition and disease,” said RESULTS Executive Director Joanne Carter. “Today that figure is 17,000 a day. When RESULTS started its lobbying work on basic education, UNESCO estimated that globally 150 million children were not in primary school. Today that figure is below 58 million. When RESULTS started lobbying on microfinance in 1986 fewer than 1 million of the very poor around the world had access to a microloan. Today more than 100 million do. RESULTS’ advocacy had a role in that change and Sam Daley-Harris played a leading role in launching that advocacy.”

Daley-Harris’ last act with the Campaign was to organize the Global Microcredit Summit, November 14-17, 2011 in Valladolid, Spain where more than 2,000 delegates from over 100 countries participated. One of the issues discussed in Spain was the creation of a Seal of Excellence for Poverty Outreach and Transformation in Microfinance initiated by Daley-Harris in April of 2010.

In 2010, Ashoka founder Bill Drayton wrote, “Sam Daley-Harris is one of the certified great social entrepreneurs of the last decades. After building RESULTS, he is the person more than anyone else who has brought microcredit into focus across the world and precipitated action. One of his mechanisms has been a series of global microcredit summits. I think these are the first such UN-like events not run by the UN, or by any government for that matter.”

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