Advocacy Strategy
There is an old saying, "If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there." Too often, community groups working for social change start out on the road without a clear sense of where they are going, and without a shared understanding of the best route for getting there.
A strategy is simply a road map for getting to your destination or achieving your goal. Just like a route map you might put together for taking a family vacation in your car, a strategy takes into account what you might need or want to do along the way. On a car trip, you take into account places to stop for meals, gas, lodging, and to see friends. You also decide whether you want to travel by the shortest route or take alternate roads to visit attractions or avoid highway construction and congested areas. You decide whether or not to use toll roads, and make sure you have enough cash to pay for the tolls, as well as any gas, food, or lodging you may need.
In a similar way, developing a strategy for reaching a goal of your group involves considering a number of factors other than your ultimate destination. A strategy helps the group understand how to put its own values into action in practical ways. It helps the group obtain the resources it will need to make the trip without running out of energy before you get there. With a shared plan of action understood by the whole group, hopefully you will be able to achieve the outcome you want on the issue you are working on. But even if you don't, a good strategy will leave the group stronger and larger than it was when it first started out, and ready to try to reach its goal, or set new ones, with more resources than it had originally.
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