- Community Advocacy
- COMMUNITY ADVOCACY BASICS: A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO ADVOCACY
- Who are local community advocates and what role do they play in community development?
- Re-functioning: A New Community Development Strategy
Our disability community needs a community advocacy strategy that is about more than disability-related issues. All the following issues deeply affect our lives as well as the lives of many others where we live:
- Health Care and Supports: Impacts children, elders, poor people, workers, LGBTQ communities. all oppressed communities
- Climate Change: Impacts everyone, most especially our community
- Transportation: Impacts elders, poor people, workers
- Housing: Impacts all oppressed communities
- Access to Healthy Food: Impacts people who are poor or who don’t have access to easily accessible transportation
- Physical and Program Access to Supports: Impacts everyone who needs supports
- Education: Affects all oppressed communities
- Pollution: Especially affects oppressed communities
- Community Development Policy: Impacts all the other issues listed here, and affects small business creation and survival
In the past, our community has focused on issues that were concretely connected to the immediate experience of individuals with disabilities. We need to change our narrow focus and expand our advocacy through alliance with others who share the impact of these local community issues with us. This means putting continuing effort into getting to know one another, building advocacy alliances around specific issues of interest to other communities, using these relationships to create mutual education about how different community issues impact different local communities, and working together to build an effective and continuing advocacy presence in our local area.
The goal in community advocacy is secondarily to stop one political decision or action, and more to make the governing constraints of our local social/community CAS more effective at supporting enabling relationships and activity for all the members of our larger community. This strategy is a different view of every aspect of organizing for change and requires us to broaden our existing idea of inclusion to reach everyone affected. This, in turn, requires us to rethink every aspect of our organizing and advocacy.
In effect, it requires a more radical vision of inclusion and advocacy that reflects an expanded understanding of “Nothing about us, without us”.
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
