Advantages And Disadvantages Of Citizen Advocacy

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In a layman’s term, advocacy is the move to make the voice of the marginalised and vulnerable people heard. Everybody have rights and needs that must be met but some group of people, due to their inability or difficulty to voice out their minds, are unable to meet these needs or demand for their rights and entitlements; when it comes to making decisions that pertain to their lives, their voice and feelings are (sometimes) being ignored and they are treated as if they do not exist. Advocacy is the forum through which the rights of the marginalised are campaigned, and through where appropriate quarters are challenged for these group’s exclusion. According to Solomam (1985), it “involves either an individual or group, or their representatives, pressing their case with …show more content…

Citizen-advocacy’s strength and limitations One major strength of citizen advocacy is that it is an individualised model. It offers one-on-one support for free and it is free from the influence of service and this gives them a strong voice. Furthermore, it brings about a long term relationship between the advocate and the client thereby enabling verbalisation due the trust that the client build in the advocate. Never the less, the main limitation of citizen-advocacy is that it is difficult to recruit volunteers due to amount of time involved in this type of advocacy. Due to the long-term basis and free services this model entails, it is hard to find people willing to sacrifice their time. Another problem with this type of advocacy is that advocate may impact their own ideas and overly ambitions on the client especially where the client could not express their feelings by themselves for example people with profound physical and mental