How to start advocating for yourself & your community

This post talks about the 3 most important ways to start advocating for yourself and your community. These are small and easy tasks that you can implement into your everyday life, without much time commitment.

First: What is self-advocacy? The textbook definition of self-advocacy is "the action of representing oneself or one's views or interests." Self-advocacy means that you are less likely to stay quiet when something is unfair or unsafe. It can also help you get resources or clarity that you might not receive without speaking up. Self-advocacy can be as simple as asking a teacher for extra help on an assignment or telling a parent about a rule that seems unfair. There are many steps in advocating for yourself, like noticing what you need, clarifying the message, planning who you will speak to, planning what you’re going to say, and following up with it if nothing ends up changing. Self-advocacy can seem scary, or awkward, or even too much, but speaking up is actually helpful to your leaders. People in power are often looking for feedback to understand what is going on in their communities, and speaking up about the issues that you are seeing only gives them a clearer picture of what’s actually happening.

Educate yourself by getting knowledge from public meetings in your community. With a simple Google search of your city's public meetings, you can easily find the dates and locations for city council meetings, town halls, school board meetings, and a few other types of meetings, depending on where you live. This is one of the most important steps, because it allows you to become the informed friend who knows information about the issues in their community, and it allows you to talk to others more knowledgeably.

Contacting your representatives is an easy and fast way to make your voice heard in the government world. Using resources like 5calls.org, you can easily find the issues that matter to you and the numbers for your representatives. It gives you a script to read while on the phone with your representative, based on which issue is important to you. Typically, when you call, you will go right to voicemail, and that’s okay! Be sure to leave your full street address at the end of the call to make sure that your call gets tallied. The number of people who call based on a certain issue is counted, and these numbers are given to the representative so they can better gauge how their constituents view a certain issue. You can also call (202) 224-3121 to get connected to the representative switchboard, in which you can request to be transferred to your representative’s office.

Find community events that allow respectful conversation on these important topics between members. You can typically find these events on your community's social media pages or by googling events going on around you. At these events, you can find people to talk to about the issues that you think are important in your community. It is crucial that you remember to stay polite and respectful to the people that you are talking to, as this is how you make your voice heard. While it might feel good to argue with someone, you will both walk away with nothing from the conversation. On the other hand, if you stay respectful and stay kind, this is where most of the change happens, as you will hopefully feel like you have learned something from that conversation.

Petitions are a way of saying that there is a solution to a problem that is occurring in your community. For example, a petition might ask a city to add safer crosswalks. Using platforms like change.org, you can find various petitions to make change countrywide, statewide, or even locally. You can search for petitions about issues that you actively care about, and you can share these with friends and family if comfortable. You can even start your own petition if you notice a problem that hasn’t been talked about yet. Once petitions start to grow, we see action start to take place. Before you sign, read the petition carefully. Make sure that you understand the issue, agree with the goal, and trust the person/organization organizing it. Keep in mind that petitions don’t work all of the time, but it is still important to attempt to make this change. Even when a petition doesn’t lead to the result that you might have hoped for, it still raises awareness, brings people together, and most importantly, it shows leaders that people are paying attention.

We challenge you to pick one of these small advocacy actions to take this week, and you will see that you can make a change even if what you think you’re doing is small. This might look like making one phone call, attending one meeting, or having one respectful conversation. It doesn’t have ot be perfect or anything big, just be real with yourself. After taking this action, take a moment to reflect on how you felt after speaking up and what you learned from this experience that you can apply in the future. A few small actions a day by a lot of people will make a huge impact in our communities. Our communities will become safer, fairer, and more responsive when more of us are willing to use our voices. Your voice matters a whole lot more than you think, and this week is your chance to prove that to yourself.