The Empowerment Institute, founded in 1981 by David Gershon and Gail Straub, has been a global leader for four decades in applying behavior change, community empowerment and transformative social change methodologies to address humanity’s greatest challenges and opportunities. 

Its empowerment methodology has been applied to achieve measurable and sustainable behavior change at the individual,  community and organizational levels. A major academic research study described this methodology as “unsurpassed in changing behavior.”

Empowerment Institute’s clients include cities, government agencies, nonprofits, and a wide array of organizations, societal institutions and social entrepreneurs interested in issues of behavior change, empowerment and large system transformation. Its clients have included American Express, Deloitte, New York City, Philadelphia, the White House, and the United Nations.

Through its professional development training programs, Empowerment Institute has trained over 3,000 empowerment facilitators worldwide who have undergone rigorous instruction that includes both didactic and experiential training. In turn these facilitators have trained hundreds of thousands of people in the empowerment methodology. Through this deep network of empowerment practitioners, Empowerment Institute is able to manage projects of any scale throughout the world.

The Empowerment Institute has designed and implemented a number of large-scale transformative social change initiatives around the issues of climate change, peace building and women’s empowerment involving the participation of millions of people in over eighty countries.