Advocating For Change

Advocacy is critical to achieving economic and social equity, particularly for residents in low-income communities and communities of color. While many people become involved in advocacy, many others are unaware of its power or feel uncertain about how to use it effectively. Advocating for Change was developed to provide an in-depth understanding of the advocacy process and to offer detailed information about how to use it successfully to create better opportunities for people and the places where they live. Case studies throughout Advocating for Change provide examples of the positive outcomes that effective advocacy efforts can deliver.

Fundamentally, advocacy aims to influence outcomes that directly affect people's lives. This is no small feat. Advocates usually face well-funded, politically connected opposition. Progress takes persistence and change takes time. Advocacy efforts typically focus on changing specific policies and practices by incremental steps toward a much larger goal.
For all the challenges that exist, advocates in cities across the nation have achieved great successes in securing improved policies and practices and moving their interests forward. Some advocates have been doing this work for years; others have only recently begun. All have relied on one or more of the advocacy strategies discussed in this manual as a vehicle for change.

This online manual is divided into four main sections:

1. Getting Started: Tips to Consider in Moving an Agenda provides several nuts-and-bolts issues to consider as you launch your advocacy effort-and get organized for change.

2. Getting People Together and Making Your Case groups together four advocacy strategies: organizing and coalition building; conducting research; working with the media; and harnessing the power of the Internet. Each of these strategies is about building support for your advocacy agenda. More often than not, one-if not all-of these strategies is used in an advocacy effort, regardless of the forum in which change is pursued.

3. Getting What You Want describes the four traditional forums in which advocates pursue their agendas for change: the courts, the legislature, the ballot, and administrative agencies. Sometimes these strategies are used in isolation; other times in combination or succession. This section concludes with a reminder to think outside the box and describes tools and tactics that go beyond the traditional steps discussed in the preceding chapters.

4. Seizing the Moment: Urgent, Unified Community Response recognizes that the need for advocacy often arises in the context of crisis: a high-profile event that for a short period of time focuses public attention on the need for positive change. This section provides tips for resolving the crisis at hand while at the same time advancing a broader advocacy agenda.

Consultants Carl Oshiro and Harry Snyder assisted in the research and writing of this manual, and contributions from former PolicyLink staff member Maya Harris, who is now director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, were also key to the manual’s development. PolicyLink appreciates their contributions and the opportunity to tell the stories of organizations and successful advocacy campaigns that are described in the text and in the case studies.

Readers may want to consult three other PolicyLink advocacy tools: Advocating for Equitable Development, which describes how advocacy can pave the way for communities to share in regional development, Organized for Change: The Activist’s Guide to Police Reform, a guide to using advocacy tools and strategies to advance community-centered policing and police reform efforts, and Click Here for Change: Your Guide to the E-Advocacy Revolution, a definitive resource for using the Internet to conduct advocacy. To order hard copies of these documents, click here.