What Do Advocates Do?
Our mission is to invite and involve a wide range of local people into a wide range of responsible personal relationships with people whose lives are diminished because of prejudice toward disability. There are many ways that a citizen advocate can be involved. Some examples are:
· Spokesperson - to vigorously represent a person’s best interests and to help them acquire necessary services and supports.
· Friend - to begin an ongoing, hopefully life long relationship that may develop into a true friendship over time.
· Ally - to stand with a person during good times and bad times.
· Monitor - to evaluate and hold human service organizations accountable for their actions.
· Mentor - to offer guidance, affirmation, and direction through your presence, personal example, and advice.
· Opportunity Maker - to arrange for a person to take advantage of new or better opportunities in our community in work, education, civic involvement, neighborhood involvement, or leisure.
· Red Tape Cutter - to help cut through policies and procedures that can sometimes overwhelm.
· Representative Payee- to assume responsibility of a person’s finances and to help the person with planning a monthly budget and saving for the future.
· Adoptive Parent - to provide a forever family.
· Legal Guardian - to assume court-sanctioned responsibility for a person’s major personal or financial decisions.
· Crisis Advocate - to respond and be present to a protégé immediately on a short term basis until a long term advocate can be recruited, oriented and matched.
· Advocate Associate - to offer your skills, talents, expertise, and influence to a citizen advocate who is advocating for his or her protégé. Advocate associates are needed in the areas of networking, political savvy, law, journalism, financial planning, housing, employment, medical, and education.