Some Advocacy Strategies

2. ESTABLISH OR JOIN A COALITION of interested individuals and organizations. It is likely that you have common interests or goals. Try contacting local Junior Leagues, Grandparents' and Senior Citizens' groups, Leagues of Women Voters, and legal services programs. For instance, the Start Healthy, Stay Healthy project in New Jersey, designed to enroll low-income children in Medicaid, involves a collaboration between Head Start and Medicaid. Prior to this project, neither group had realized the extent of their mutual goals.

3. REQUEST THAT LEGISLATORS or their staff meet with you and your organization to discuss some of your concerns about their policies, or to reinforce your support for their position. Offer examples of how important programs help young children and families and why they are worth saving. Follow up the meeting with a note thanking the member for supporting, or at least listening to, your position.

4. WRITE A LETTER to your local or state legislator. It has been said that 15 letters will get the attention of a state legislator. The key is to get letters from parents, child care providers, and even children, describing how legislative changes and/or funding cutbacks will affect them. It's important to communicate while legislation is being drafted, when it is considered in committee, and during the debate and voting process on the floor.

5. PERSONALIZE YOUR ISSUE. Often funding cuts will mean the loss of jobs for important people. Parents and providers should write letters about the significance of a particular person in their lives, and how the loss of that person's services will affect them. Legislators should be able to picture the impact of a particular program on a family or community that will be affected.

6. INVITE LEGISLATORS TO VISIT your programs or families. Spending time with constituents will help to educate legislators about what you do, and how important certain programs are for families and child care services. It will also give them an opportunity to attract media attention and publicly express their support for children and families.

7. ORGANIZE AN EVENT to tell your story to a wider audience. Organizing an event, such as a doll campaign, or a walk in a child care provider's or working mother's footsteps can also attract the media. Or conduct a survey of parents on a waiting list for subsidized child care and stage a press conference to release the results.

8. WRITE AN OP-ED PIECE OR LETTER TO THE EDITOR for your local newspaper. Get parents, business leaders, funders, and other community supporters to do the same.

(Compiled from "Ideas for Simple and Not So Simple Advocacy
Strategies," an article in the September 1995 issue of the Child Care Law
Center's Working for Change journal)