Citizen Advocacy organisations seek to cause benefit by reconnecting people who have become isolated from the ordinary community. Their practice was defined in two key documents: CAPE in 1980 and Learning From Citizen Advocacy Programs in 1987. The theoretical foundation of Citizen Advocacy is found in Citizen Advocacy and protective services for the impaired and handicapped. A central idea on which this practice is based is that the devaluation of a person or group by society has profoundly negative effects on their lives. Citizen Advocacy organisations seek to challenge this devaluation by connecting a 'devalued' person with a 'valued' person, prompting the community into valuing the 'devalued' person. It's also expected that the 'valued person' will be likely to stand up for the rights and interests of the other person. In explaining how strongly they will do so it's often said that they will do so "as if were one's own". It's seen the whole activity will be of benefit not just to the devalued person, but to the valued person, the group of people that this devalued person has been seen to belong to, and the community as a whole.
Key ideas
At the heart of the work of a Citizen Advocacy organisation is the belief that how well an individual or group is valued by society affects how society treats them. This idea is seen as particularly powerful in the context of certain groups of people whom society identifies as being somehow fundamentally negatively different from, and of lower value than, ordinary people. Citizen Advocacy organisations seek to cause benefit by connecting individual people who have been excluded and devalued with someone generally seen by society as being valued. There are some clear immediate effects on the person's exclusion and sense of self-worth. But also very important are the anticipated effects brought about when the ordinary community sees that a 'valued' person has an ordinary relationship with this person, and that this 'valued' person sees them as an equal. However, the anticipated effects are even wider than this, in that it is assumed that society will extend their conclusions to cover the group of people whom the individual has been seen to belong to.
Simplified illustrative example
Stories of actual Citizen Advocacy relationships have been written about in many contexts. One set of such stories is found in One person at a time: Citizen Advocacy for people with disabilities.
The challenge of creating real relationships
The desired effects of this work, in all senses, arise from the naturalness and personal nature of the relationships that a Citizen Advocacy organisation is able to create. One of the key challenges for a Citizen Advocacy organisation is that this relies on the art of being able to identify two people who seem likely to make a personal connection - and on bringing them together in a way which leads to such a relationship. There are many actions and influences that can undermine these efforts. Problems tend to revolve around existing social expectations for the 'devalued' person. Often society at large will anticipate that this person is not really worth knowing, and has little to offer - but that they might be helped through paid services or with the assistance of volunteers. Working in an environment where such expectations are the norm, it becomes easy for an organisations practice to drift towards fitting in with them. An organisation might instead find themselves creating relationships where the 'valued' person is seen to be a volunteer, at which point the activity has become a fundamentally different one. In this case the effects of the work may even be to add to the devaluation of the 'devalued' person.
Since the creation of the concept of the Citizen Advocacy organisation, these misunderstandings have had a number of effects. The key one is that many organisations use the title 'citizen advocacy' to refer to different forms of activity. For instance alternative activities include:
having volunteers help to advocate for people who are not being heard, and
having volunteers act as an artificial 'friend'.
The first of these activities in particular, has been found to have some benefits for some people, and often such organisations in the UK now refer to themselves as practising 'Independent Advocacy'" using volunteers. However confusion is particularly apparent when this kind of organisation seeks to support people by using volunteers in the longer term. Since these organisations are practising a different activity the founding documents behind the idea of a citizen advocacy organisation often do not fit with their work. These developments raise difficult questions about the definition of a Citizen Advocacy organisation. If the practice of most organisations which use the title is no longer in line with the founding documents, is it correct to say that they are no longer Citizen Advocacy organisations? Or is it correct to say that the practice of Citizen Advocacy organisations has now changed so that the founding documents no longer fit it?
Key principles
The founding principles behind the work of a Citizen Advocacy organisation include many focused on protecting the personal nature of the relationships created:
The benefits to the 'valued' person should be personal.
The 'valued' person should not see their role as being a volunteer with the organisation, but as being in a personal relationship.
There are also principles directed at ensuring that the organisation's work is not limited by conflicting interests, and that it is not seen to have conflicting interests:
The organisation should be an independent one.
The organisation should not be sharing offices with organisations seen to have conflicting interests.
Further principles include:
The office staff should not be drawn into working directly with problems that the 'devalued' individuals face, because overall there will be more benefit from the time being used in the building of relationships.
Behind these principles lies the firm belief that people who are currently devalued and excluded by society are of equal worth, and very much worth knowing personally. It is seen that society as a whole will benefit from these people being fully included, and that exclusion occurs because of the social response to groups of people, not because that individual can not be included. The work of a Citizen Advocacy organisation is fundamentally different from that of organisations that seek to help people cope with their devaluation and exclusion. Indeed, one of the key reasons that the idea of the citizen advocacy organisation was created is that society's response to the problems of devaluation and exclusion can be to create service systems which, while trying to help, actually further exclude and devalue people.
