I found it important that many of the readings for the week not only touched on the planner’s role as an advocate, but also talked about the role that individuals and communities play alongside advocates to work towards achieving a goal. The New Global Frontier article referred to strategies that OUPs enacted that went far beyond delivering a product and encompassed what they termed as community capital. I believe this is truly where the real value is in advocacy work. It is a great service to work tirelessly on behalf of a group and bring long neglected but important issues to the forefront, but it is much more powerful to develop as well as use existing local capacity so that communities can become stronger advocates for themselves. Indeed, in A Home in the City, one of the operational recommendations the authors make is to “recognize that the urban poor are active agents and not passive beneficiaries of development” (3). Working with current organizations will only make the advocate’s work more beneficial, as it is a valuable starting point for any project, in addition to helping to ensure that the issues being worked on are truly what the community wants and needs, not just what people from the outside deem to be important.
In Louder than Words, there is a chapter on lawyer advocacy work done on behalf of Thai and Latino garment workers in LA. The lawyers and other advocates involved not only took advantage of community based partnerships but also made it a priority to empower the workers whom had been enslaved and lost so much of their agency. Some of the strategies they used while working alongside these workers included viewing the workers as peers, not clients. In doing this, they established an equal playing field and didn’t define the relationship by the lawyer’s education and skills. In addition, they stressed the importance of language, making sure that the workers understood the legal process they were going through to prosecute the garment factory contractors, but also more importantly, giving them the opportunity to learn English, which allowed them to gain valuable skills that would improve their life going forward. Also, while advocates are usually expected to speak on behalf of a group, these lawyers stressed the need for the garment workers to speak firsthand about their experiences despite the language barriers, because it was their personal stories to tell, and also because the stories are what actually matter, not how articulate one may sound when sharing them.
Particularly in situations where there is a language barrier or cultural differences between the advocate and the community, the importance of building trust by good listening and communication skills goes a long way. An advocate should not make a group feel as though the advocate’s agenda or views of what is best are the basis for the relationship. The interests and goals of the community should always be the main focus, even if there are broader issues that an advocate might want to address, as in the garment worker case.
The readings for this week truly underscored for me that an advocate’s relationship with a community is above all, one of collaboration.
Leave a Reply