In 1997, the Center co-founded the Civil Society Forum of the Americas with CEPIA, a leading Brazilian human rights and women’s rights organization. The Forum provides a space where representatives of diverse sectors of civil society – such as human rights, health, environment, development, peace, and women's rights organizations – can meet to strengthen partnerships and devise common strategies to address shared problems. Its overall mission is to promote polices that improve social justice, equity, and solidarity in the Americas.

Despite its youth, the Forum is already having a positive impact. It has sponsored numerous regional, subregional and national meetings, publishing the results and declarations in a series of Forum Notebooks, the Cuadernos del Foro, in Spanish and Portuguese. On a global scale, the Forum was a co-sponsor of the EXPO 2000, “Responsible Governance in a Global Society”, in Hanover, Germany and a participant in meetings of CIVICUS and other organizations committed to strengthening civil society. It also maintains an interactive web site in Spanish, Portuguese, and English that serves its global network.

The Forum has designated three priority areas: regional integration, state reform, and increased citizen participation. It has carried out the following activities in each of these:

Regional Integration

The common market of the Southern Cone, called Mercosur, is now being established. It includes Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. To date, the focus has been exclusively on economic integration. The Civil Society Forum has been working to expand the focus to include considerations of rights, especially social and economic rights. It has undertaken the following activities:

• In 1998, the Forum conducted research on social and economic rights in the Mercosur countries. These were published as a Forum Notebook.
• The following year, the Forum conducted a comparative study analyzing legislation in the Mercosur countries concerning health, reproductive rights, the environment, race, gender, and ethnicity. In a meeting in June 2000, close to forty participants (NGOs, researchers, academics, lawyers, and labor unions from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay) met to discuss the finding.
• Building on these studies, CEPIA organized several meetings – some regional, some in Brazil – to give further attention to social and economic rights within the Mercosur.

State Reform Processes

The Forum has worked with the Center to sponsor meetings on health reform in Latin America. These have been discussed earlier under the Center's activities to promote health reform in the region.

New Mechanisms for Citizen Participation

Under the Forum’s sponsorship in 1998, three leading Mexican organizations, Equality, Citizenship, Work and Family (Equidad de Género), the Reproductive Choice Information Group (GIRE), and the National Institute of Public Health organized a national meeting entitled, Civil Society’s Agenda on Diversity. Thirty five leaders of Mexican civil society organizations, academics, and intellectuals discussed and formulated an agenda on diversity for civil society, aiming to build a culture of respect in today’s multi-cultural Mexico. The findings of this meeting were published as a Forum Notebook and were widely disseminated within Mexico and the region.

In 1999, two leading human rights and social science research organizations in Argentina, the Center for the State and Society (CEDES) and the Center for the Study of Law and Sociology (CELS), organized, under the Forum's sponsorship, a national meeting on New Mechanisms of Citizen Participation. Leaders of civil society organizations from diverse fields met to consider recent legal changes that have given rise to new avenues of public participation and to propose plans to increase citizen action. The presentations and commentaries were published as a Forum Notebook and distributed through the region.

The Center and CEPIA shared the secretariat for the Forum's early years, until its infrastructure and governing mechanisms could be established. In October of 2000, the Forum's Advisory board established a single secretariat based in CEPIA. José Barzelatto was named president of the board of directors, and Stephen Isaacs the vice-president. The Center continues to work closely with the Forum secretariat as an active member of the Forum.