Plan for Advocacy and Alternative Possibilities Instructions
Complete all of the assigned reading for Units 9 to 11 and review your answers to the study questions. Identify an issue that is of importance in your community and choose a group through which you could advocate this issue.
Next, obtain your tutor’s approval for your chosen issue and group. Consult with your tutor if you are having difficulty selecting either an appropriate issue or group or both. Formulate an advocacy plan for this issue that focuses on working with this group.
To gather information on the group, use their websites, printed materials, and videos, and trustworthy news articles and stories on the group. If you choose to communicate with the group in any way (email, phone, in person), please let your tutor know so that the appropriate research ethics can be discussed and followed.
If any part of your assignment involves research with human subjects (interview, survey/questionnaire, focus group, life history, participant observation), read the Women’s and Gender Studies Research and Ethics Guidelines. Then download and complete the appropriate recruitment and consent forms, which are available on that page. Submit them with your assignment.
Your plan for advocacy should
1.describe the group you propose to work with and provide an analysis of the group’s strengths and weaknesses.
2.clearly identify the key issue of your advocacy effort.
3.describe the opportunities as well as the barriers that the group may face with respect to the advocacy issue you have chosen to address.
4.contain a detailed description of how you intend to proceed. Your plan should discuss
•who will advocate
•to whom they will advocate
•how they will advocate (that is, what strategies they will use)
•what group processes and tools will be used
•the timelines
•a budget
5.where appropriate, include alternative possibilities for each of these categories and give your reasons for the choices you have made. Be creative and imaginative in your choices.
Your advocacy plan should also reflect your responses to these critical questions:
•What is the focus of my advocacy strategy?
•Who are my target audiences and what do I want them to do?
•What is the impact that I hope these strategies will have?
•What are the actual policy changes and decision-making structures that I want to change or influence?
For help in answering these questions, see
Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID). (2003, December). An advocacy guide for feminists. Young Women and Leadership, 1, 1–8.
The structure of your advocacy plan should be clearly laid out. Include appropriate headings and subheadings, and provide sufficient information under each heading to give a clear description of the situation and the proposed plan of action.
Your plan/essay should be no less than 1,500 and no more than 3,000 words long. It should detail the research you have done on the issue and the resource materials you plan to use.
Remember to provide scholarly support for the claims that you make in your essay and to document your sources thoroughly and correctly using APA style. All direct quotations and indirect references to course materials (study guides and readings) and to sources that you find in your own academic research (books, journal articles, news articles, organization websites) must be cited both in-text and in a references list. Every time you use someone else’s words, ideas, statistics, or research, you must give them proper credit by using an in-text citation. Proper in-text citations are worth a large part of each of this course’s assignments. If you have not used in-text citations before, please contact your tutor with questions. For help on using APA format, go to the Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL).
Your tutor will also want to know when ideas are your own; indicate that by using the first person and by clearly stating, for example, “I think,” “I argue,” or “I propose.”
Assignment 3 will be evaluated for
•accurate representation of your ideas on group process, strategies, and tools as presented in the course materials
•a rich representation of the group drawn from various source materials
•a comprehensive response to the critical questions listed above
•clarity of writing, including
