Empowerment Institute, founded in 1981 by David Gershon and Gail Straub, is the world's preeminent consulting and training organization specializing in the practice of empowerment. Its empowerment methodology has been applied over the past three decades to achieve measurable and sustainable behavior change at the individual, organizational and community level. A major academic research study described this methodology as “unsurpassed in changing behavior.”

Empowerment Institute’s clients include large corporations, cities, government agencies, nonprofits, and a wide array of 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.

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

Empowerment Institute through its nonprofit research arm, Global Action Plan, engages in applied research and development initiatives around the issues of behavior change, community empowerment and sustainable development. As part of that inquiry it participates in a global research network of NGOs, academic institutions, and social entrepreneurs.