Advocating for Adolescent Reproductive and Sexual Health
Advocacy is critical in efforts to ensure that adolescent reproductive and sexual health programs are enacted, funded, implemented, and maintained. Advocacy (like lobbying) seems intimidating to many—but the idea is more frightening than the activity. All advocacy involves is making a case in favor of a particular cause (such as comprehensive sex education) and trying to get others to support it as well.
Advocacy includes any attempt to influence the political climate, public perceptions, policy decisions, and funding to improve adolescent reproductive and sexual health. Advocacy takes many forms. A comprehensive advocacy campaign will first and foremost influence political support for a program by educating policy makers. Policy makers can include national, state, or local legislators, county or city council members, school board members, or anyone else in a position to promote or reject proposals that you care about. Another important target for advocacy campaigns is the public, since public desires affect political decisions. A campaign aimed at the public could target a general community or a specific group such as parents in a particular neighborhood.
The only prerequisite to being an advocate is being committed to the issue. Too often, people do not see themselves as appropriate advocates because they are not lobbyists. In fact, your first-hand experience as a youth-serving professional, health care provider, educator, parent, or youth activist provides you with a remarkable body of expertise that can, and should, be more available to policy makers. Click below for more information:
Advocates' Publications on Advocating for Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive
Health:
- Advocacy Kit [pdf]
- Building Leadership for an Effective Organization: Selected Annotated Bibliography (From Research to Practice) [html] [pdf]
- Building Local Coalitions to Prevent Teen Pregnancy (From Research to Practice) [html]
- Creating Successful Public Education Campaigns to Prevent Teen Pregnancy and HIV (From Research to Practice) [html]
- Rights. Respect. Responsibility.® (3Rs) Campaign Kit. (Transitions) To read this issue, visit the 3Rs Campaign Web site.
- Rights. Respect. Responsibility.®—The Fix the GAP Campaign (Campaign Toolkit) [html] [pdf]
- Rights. Respect. Responsibility.®—The Keep it REAL Campaign (Campaign Toolkit) [html] [pdf]
- My Voice Counts! Campaigns for Youth's Reproductive and Sexual Health: Advocacy and Organizing Toolkit (Campaign Toolkit) [html] [pdf]
- Rights. Respect. Responsibility.® Campaign Kit [pdf]
- Teenage Pregnancy, The Case for Prevention [html] [pdf]
- Walk in My Shoes: A Black Activist’s Guide to Surviving the Women’s Movement [html]
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