Leni

The Philippines, CAHR, Spring 2025

Leni Velasco is the Co-founder and Secretary-General of DAKILA, an artist-activist collective in the Philippines building the movement for social transformation. She is currently the Executive Director of the Active Vista Center, a learning institution facilitating the social formation of citizens as active agents of change in their communities.

Her activism journey started as a student leader at the University of the Philippines and deepened through her experience in the working-class movement. In her 30 years as an activist, she has worked across a multitude of issues that challenge power relations, advocating for human rights and amplifying the voices of the marginalized through creative campaigning, strategic communications, and grassroots organizing among youth and creatives. To address the growing apathy and frustration among citizens due to the failed promises of democracy in the Philippines, she channeled her activism toward innovating civic engagement and mentoring the younger generation of human rights defenders to strengthen social movements. She steered social advocacy campaigns utilizing the arts, media, and popular culture.

In the context of the populist-authoritarian playbook of the Duterte and Marcos Jr. regimes, her organization, DAKILA, led pioneering narrative change initiatives and approaches to combat harmful narratives undermining rights and freedoms. Its work on digital activism, cross-movement collaboration, civic education, creative resistance, broad-based organizing, and narrative change-making continues to make a meaningful impact on the lives, livelihoods, and lifestyles of the Filipino people. Under her leadership, DAKILA received numerous awards, such as the Amnesty International Ignite Award for Most Outstanding Human Rights Organization, the Freedom Flame Award, and the Human Rights Dutch Tulip Award.

Leni was the founding Festival Director of the Active Vista Human Rights Festival, which is held annually to commemorate the anniversary of Martial Law in the Philippines. Since 2008, the festival has reached thousands of audiences through its film screenings, forums, exhibitions, performances, and workshops. It develops, produces, distributes, and screens human rights-themed films with social impact campaigns and mentors aspiring storytellers for social change. She is actively involved in the intersection of art and activism as a member of the Global Impact Producers Alliance (GIPA) and a trustee of the Albay Arts Foundation. She currently represents East Asia in the Governance Circle of the global network Innovation for Change and sits on the Board of Women’s Day Off, a center for working women.

Leni’s recent work focuses on developing strategies to disrupt the authoritarian regime’s populist, violent, and divisive narratives, organizing campaigns to convey abstract human rights ideals to resonate with the lived realities of the people, nurturing people’s solidarity through relational organizing to cultivate transformative action, enabling innovations in social movement building to expand civic spaces, and cultivating collective care in the community of practice of human rights defenders.