What Advocacy Means for a Small CBO

Advocacy is one of the three activities named on our registration certificate, alongside care for orphans and vulnerable children, the elderly and people with disabilities, and networking and community building. Of the three it is the one people ask about least, and the one most often misunderstood.

The word suggests placards, press statements and campaigns. In a small Community Based Organisation it means something a good deal duller, and more useful, which is why it is worth setting out plainly.

What advocacy is not

It is not marching. It is not a slogan, and it is not a statement about a national issue we have no particular knowledge of. Organisations of our size sometimes reach for that language because it is cheap and it looks like activity. It very rarely changes anything for a single household.

It is also not legal representation. We are a community organisation, not a legal aid service. We cannot act for anyone formally, we have no standing before any tribunal, and we do not pretend otherwise. Where a matter needs a lawyer or a formal complaint properly lodged, we say so, and we refer.

What advocacy is, in practice, is accompaniment. It is going with somebody to the place where they are entitled to something, and staying there until it is either granted or properly refused.

The shape of the actual work

Sitting with a family in an office until somebody explains the form. Services are rarely withheld on purpose. They are explained once, quickly, to somebody who did not follow, and then never explained again. A person who cannot read the form, or who was sent to the wrong queue, is turned away by the process rather than by anyone's decision.

Knowing which desk to go to. This sounds trivial and it is most of the job. Which office, which days it is open, which document comes first, what it costs, who to ask for. None of that is secret. It is just expensive to learn one wasted journey at a time.

Making a call a family cannot make. Sometimes because they do not have the number. Sometimes because they have it, and who is asking still changes the answer more than it ought to.

Going back. Being told to return next week is not a refusal, but it works like one for a household that cannot spare another day's fare. Following up is the part that decides whether anything actually happened.

What families most often need

The requests that reach us are ordinary and they repeat. A birth certificate, without which a child cannot be registered for much of anything. A disability assessment, which is the gateway to services and concessions that otherwise stay theoretical. A place in a school that has said there is no room.

None of these are dramatic, and none are favours. They are entitlements made hard to reach by some combination of cost, distance, paperwork and nobody having time to explain.

Our part is small and specific. Work out what is required, help assemble it, go along, and keep asking. Sometimes the honest conclusion is that the answer is no, and a family is entitled to hear that clearly rather than be left waiting.

Why it is uncomfortable work

Advocacy makes you less popular than delivering food does. Arriving with supplies makes everybody feel better. Arriving to ask why a file has not moved makes somebody's afternoon harder.

Most officials we deal with are neither obstructive nor unkind. They are understaffed and working through a queue. But a queue is precisely what advocacy interrupts, and a person who keeps coming back to ask about one household is, from the other side of the desk, a nuisance.

So we try to be a particular kind of nuisance: polite, specific, and correct about the facts. We do not accuse anybody. We ask what is needed and when it can be done, and we write down the answer. An organisation that shouts loses the relationships it will need next month for a different family.

It still costs something. Being useful to a household sometimes means being unwelcome in an office, and that is a trade we have decided to accept.

How one family teaches you what needs changing

The objection to helping case by case is that it does not scale. One family assisted is one family, and the thing that made it hard remains exactly as it was for everybody behind them.

That is true, and it is also incomplete. You cannot see a pattern from outside it. It is only after sitting through the same obstacle with different households that you can say with any confidence which step in a process defeats people, and whether the difficulty is the rule itself, the way it is explained, or the cost of reaching the counter.

That is the honest route from the particular to the general. Not a campaign written first with evidence found afterwards, but a narrow, unexciting observation earned by turning up repeatedly, which can then be put to the people in a position to change it.

It is slow, we are small, and we would not claim more for it than that. If there is a household near us struggling to get something they are owed, get in touch. Our registration details are on the about page.