Investigating Systemic versus Individual Advocacy
Eleanor Christopher Keywords: Advocacy, Disability Justice, Lobbying Benefits, Individual Empowerment, Education “Advocacy” can be kind of a buzzword. Furthermore, types of advocacy and the way advocacy is described can vary greatly depending on the field where it’s being discussed. Because of this wide range of definitions, specifications are necessary to begin this conversation, but not particularly useful. For the sake of this article today, I will define advocacy as “speaking up for someone or something, in order to achieve desired results which would not have been possible without intervention.” The field of advocacy I will be focusing on is that which is relevant to Mentor A Promise: advocacy from a social justice standpoint, focusing on achieving access to housing and disability resources for children. For this purpose, three types of advocacy generally can be agreed on as useful: self-, individual, and systems advocacy (The Borgen Project, 1 ). Self-advocacy refers to yo...
