04/12/2023 1

Advocacy 101

Purpose and Community

What is Advocacy?

• Speaking on behalf of yourself and others• Supporting rights• Solving problems• Writing letters• Bringing people together• Always learning• Sharing power

Why Be An Advocate?

• To “Pay Forward” to your Community• To fight stereotypes and lack of access• To empower others• To develop your self• To build a career• To build a community of activists• To build choice for all

What is Your Community?

• It is the place and people where you feel like you belong

• Community is based on mutual trust and respect

• If a vital community is a fast flowing river, the rain that keeps it flowing is shared “stories”

• Out of stories, a community creates its culture, its rituals, its beliefs

Purpose Grows from Community

• Every Advocate has a purpose or a goal• The purpose guides how you help others and

what you fight for• If you want to be an effective advocate, your

purpose should grow from your community• It should reflect your community’s needs and

dreams

Your Support Network (SN)

• You need a SN to develop skills and focus on purpose

• Your SN should be a group of people who share your purpose

• Your SN will help you understand your community’s needs

• Your SN will help you develop change activities that support your purpose

• Your SN will guide you through failure and celebrate your success

Build Your SN

• Find members of your community who are dissatisfied with the place of the community in the larger society locally, regionally, whatever

• Start and continue sharing stories in a community comfortable place about the dissatisfaction until some agreement on a goal is reached

• Use that agreement to plan an action• Stick with an easy win• Use the easy win to find more members of your SN• And so on

How to Plan

• Start with how you’d like things to be (outcome)• Step back from the Outcome by asking “What

would we need to get there?”• Keep stepping back to where you are now• Execute!• If your outcome is too big, you’ll see that as you

try to step back• If you get stuck, stop planning for a week and

come back to it

Keep the SN Together

• Your community has more to do than your purpose

• Keep your community together by sharing more than an advocate’s purpose

• Do projects for each other• Support other people’s work• Have fun!

Advocacy and Community

• The community is bigger than your advocacy• Let the community tell you where your

advocacy should go• If your community resists your advocacy, take

the time to figure out why• Change your advocacy to fit your community’s

journey

The Advocate’s Role

• As an advocate, you are a steward of your community’s assets (people, skills, history, money)

• A steward preserves and expands assets, and does not waste them

• Assets belong to the community, not to you• An advocate must make moral decisions in

advocacy actions, no matter how “bad” the target of an action might be

Soul Resources

• Civic Link at http://bit.ly/IlCgd• How to Change the World at http://

bit.ly/W9T94• Creating Community Books on Amazon at

http://bit.ly/zeGBZ• Transformational Leadership at

http://bit.ly/150ayc

Web Resources

• National Consortium on Leadership and Disability for Youth at http://www.ncld-youth.info/

• Community Organizing Links at http://bit.ly/E6R8S

• Leadership and Disability at http://bit.ly/ON22O

• Disaboom at http://www.disaboom.com/

My Resources

• My Twitter Account: mdrcngd• My Blogs:

– The Recovering Life– LTC Reform– Communities of Power– Universal Education

• MDRC Website: http://www.copower.org/• Linkedin Profile: http://bit.ly/s1mS• Email: ndelisle@prosynergy.org• Download This Presentation: • Comment on this Presentation

Final Thoughts

• "Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?”- Abraham Lincoln

• " … Each human being has value as a human being; ... we're all interdependent; the idea that we can change the world, and the first step is to change ourselves." -Dr. Burton Blatt

• "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.“ -Martin Luther King Jr.