“Social justice advocacy” is concerned with influencing powerful actors – be they elected officials, civil servants, business leaders, donors, investors, or nonprofit leaders – to take actions that benefit marginalized, ignored, and frequently poor members of their societies. Social justice advocacy roots itself in a few key ideas:

1. Those in power, those able to make rules (like policies, laws, statutes, “best practices”), do not frequently willingly give up their privileged positions;

2. Challenging such institutionalized power requires broad coalitions of actors;

3. Coalitions of this kind must have leadership composed of the very populations meant to benefit from a policy, practice, or rule change;

4. Efforts to gain ground can take decades, even a century or more.

This course is an introduction to social justice advocacy. It focuses on analyzing real-life advocacy efforts, and will frequently bring in – via Skype – actors who played lead roles in these efforts. The class will also be organized as a collegial competition: students will form teams, and each team will vie to develop the best advocacy strategy for improving the treatment of the homeless here in the city of Monterey. The best strategy will be determined by an external panel of local homeless advocates, experts, and stakeholders.

This course can be used as a “Capstone Springboard”. Students whose capstone project centers on policy advocacy should take this and also sign up for the two-credit “Capstone Springboard Project” course.

Learning Objectives

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

1. Articulate the difference between advocacy, lobbying, social marketing, communication for change, development communication, public relations, and promotion.

2. Articulate the specific strengths and challenges of social justice advocacy vis-à-vis other forms of advocacy.

3. Do a power analysis particularly suited to unpacking institutional contexts that produce structural, inter-generational marginalization, exclusion, and inequity.

4. Conduct cost-benefit analyses of different advocacy tactics

5. Conceptualize and write a social justice advocacy strategy

6. Pitch their advocacy strategy in a way that potential donors can hear, understand, and support

7. Articulate why social justice advocacy is so hard to fund

8. Plan for advocacy evaluation (NOTE: the competency here is evaluation planning and not evaluation itself. Students hoping to build evaluation competencies should take MPA’s evaluation class with Beryl Levinger.)