Virginia Atkinson

Virginia Atkinson has 15 years of international advocacy and capacity building experience. She is the Senior Global Inclusion Advisor of the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) where she has participated in over 50 missions to 29 countries.

Atkinson is lead author of the manual Equal Access: How to Include Persons with Disabilities in Elections and Political Processes; led development of ElectionAccess.org, a global resource on the rights of persons with disabilities; and co-developed an Election Access Observation Toolkit methodology which has been implemented in over a dozen countries. She led development of the “Disability Rights and Elections” module of the Building Resources in Democracy, Governance and Elections training curriculum.

Prior to IFES, she worked for Survivor Corps, an organization that advocated for the rights of conflict survivors. Atkinson holds a bachelor’s from Mary Washington College and a master’s from the University of Reading, England.