Getting Started with Advocacy

North Sound ACH launched a learning, advocacy, and collaborative action network, open to all community members and organizations seeking to advance a just and inclusive culture and the necessary conditions required for all community members to thrive.

Together we endeavor to dismantle and heal inherited legacies of exclusion and trauma, expand the vital conditions that all people need to thrive, and create new legacies for well-being and justice.

A key change strategy in this shared work is advocacy.

• Transforming the current state through fresh, collaborative approaches and voices.
• Influencing local/regional policies and organizational practices.
• Using our voices and power to influence state policy and investments.
• Leveraging knowledge to address the region’s current and emerging complexities that cross clinical and social issues, including those that will advance equity, and address privilege and structural racism.

Advocacy is the act of creating change by influencing decisions, policies, practices, and resource allocations within political, economic, and social systems and institutions. Advocacy activities can include educating, relationship building, organizing, coalition building, communicating, and lobbying. Effective advocacy enables nonprofits to shape the public debate on important social issues and ensure that underserved communities have a voice in the policies that impact their lives.