Skills and Strategies for Effective Self and Peer Advocacy

What is Advocacy?

“Advocacy” can mean many things, but in general, it refers to taking action. Advocacy simply involves speaking and acting on behalf of yourself or others. There are several types of action that a person can take:

• Self-advocacy: taking action to represent and advance your own interests;
• Peer advocacy: taking action to represent the rights and interests of someone other than yourself;
• Systems advocacy: taking action to influence social, political, and economic systems to bring about change for groups of people; and
• Legal advocacy: taking action to use attorneys and the legal or administrative systems to establish or protect legal rights.

Why advocate?

Whether you are trying to get a service provider to listen and respond to a concern or negotiating with your employer, advocacy is practiced by people for many different reasons. For people with disabilities, frequent interaction with service providers, family members, friends, colleagues and others who may not recognise you as a decision-maker can disempower you. Learning about and practicing self-advocacy and peer advocacy skills can strengthen your role and confidence in making the decisions that affect your life.

While there’s no guarantee that your advocating will always work, self-confidence, a healthier self-esteem and newly-gained respect from others can all be surprising by-products of the advocacy process.

Building an advocacy plan

Effective advocacy, of any kind, requires building a solid plan and practicing skills to help you feel comfortable and confident in reaching your advocacy goals.

Why is having a plan so important? Because it allows you to take action as an advocate in a thoughtful way. By really thinking about what you want to advocate for and how your will take action, you are more likely to resolve the problem as quickly as possible.

Identify what you want to advocate for, and four things you should do before you begin. The goal of a strong advocacy plan and developing strong basic advocacy skills is to help you resolve your complaint informally, without legal or outside agency involvement. Generally, you should start your advocacy using these basic techniques.

In order to make your advocacy efforts effective you should:

1. Break down the problem
2. Educate yourself
3. Identify your rights
4. Develop a solution (goal) and plan to address your problem

This planning process takes time. Sometimes even the best laid plans fail to achieve the identified goal. It requires that you clarify your goal, identify who you will communicate with to achieve your goal, determine what methods or strategies you want to employ and figure out what steps you need to take for follow-up.

For help to plan a goal use EnableMe goal setting tool or call StrokeLine 1800 787 653

Note: This is the first in a series of blogs about advocating in EnableMe

Information via: www.disabilityrightswi.org/