Published in Inroads, the newsletter of Citizen Advocacy Eastern Suburbs, Issue 1 (October - December, 1995)
These are located on the Citizen Advocacy Network website,
in the section on articles and policy documents.
One sure way of avoiding disillusionment is not to harbour illusions in the first place. People who have limited contact with, or who possess a superficial knowledge of, Citizen Advocacy quite often have a distorted sense of perspective about the scale of its impact, overestimating the number of people in need which Citizen Advocacy is able to help. Unrealistic expectations about the magnitude of Citizen Advocacy's capacity will, eventually but invariably, lead to disillusionment.
Not that there is anything illusory about the potential for Citizen Advocacy to make a significant, positive difference in the lives of people who have been recruited as proteges of the programme. However, in terms of its numerical scope, Citizen Advocacy will never be able to find committed citizens for all people with disabilities who need advocates. Nor will the continued presence of Citizen Advocacy result in the cataclysmic transformation of the human service landscape, ushering in more responsive, accountable services on a gargantuan scale.
Realistically, Citizen Advocacy will remain an effective, but nonetheless quantitatively limited response to the
needs of people with disabilities, because it is unlikely to gain wide acceptance in our society. By acceptance, I mean not only passive approval of the concept, but also active involvement in a citizen advocacy programme -- as advocates, board members, and so on. However, Citizen Advocacy's "failure" to attract universal appeal must be understood in the context of the attitudinal trends of our society. The observations below offer some explanation as to why, in its philosophy and practice, Citizen Advocacy will continue to swim against the tide of dominant values in our culture.
1. Whereas our society is becoming increasingly selfish, Citizen Advocacy asks people to consider the interests of others.
It can be cogently argued that our society increasingly condones -- indeed exalts -- the selfish pursuits of individual interests to the detriment of others' well-being. The I'm-all-right-Jack social Darwinism which permeates our society necessarily means that people in need are likely to be overlooked or dismissed as encumbrances
to the attainment of the culturally legitimised, self-promoting goals of many individuals. In such a self-centred social environment, Citizen Advocacy stands in contradiction by appealing to people to be "others-centred."
2. Whereas our society does not value people with disabilities, Citizen Advocacy asks people to ally themselves with individuals with disabilities.
Our society places high value on such characteristics as wealth, health, physical beauty, youthfulness, intellectual ability, independence, and productivity. As a corollary, people who possess such socially desirable characteristics are valued. In contrast, those who personify the opposite of the qualities which society values, become devalued. Clearly, individuals with disabilities, constitute one of a number of groups in society who are not valued. The very fact that people with disabilities are devalued -- that is, they are perceived to be of low value or worth -- means that there is likely to be relatively few citizens who will come forward and act as their allies. The ideological currents thus militate against the success of the citizen advocacy office in recruiting vast numbers of advocates for people with disabilities. (However, this reality must not serve as an excuse for citizen advocacy programmes to become lazy in their search for advocates. Citizen advocacy programmes must cling to the faith that people will be prepared to assume roles as advocates if asked to do so, even if the response is not apt to be great in number.)
3. Whereas human services are becoming increasingly professionalised, Citizen Advocacy remains an informal, community-oriented, helping form.
Our society is currently witnessing the increasing professionalisation, formalisation and bureaucratisation of human services. More than ever, we are led to believe that ordinary human needs are best met by formal services utilising impersonal, technological means. Seemingly everywhere, the tentacles of the human service octopus are strangling informal ways of helping. An outcome of this practice is the emergence of the cult of the human service "expert" who is deemed to know best, and to whom we must defer consistently. An attendant consequence is that the contributions of ordinary people (friends, neighbours, concerned citizens, etc.) are overlooked or debased because such persons are regarded as "unqualified." In contrast, Citizen Advocacy invites the involvement of ordinary citizens who respond to the fundamental needs of people with disabilities in typical, informal, personal ways.
4. Whereas our society tends to define success in terms of concrete, discrete outcomes, Citizen Advocacy often yields intangible benefits.
We live in an age in which science has been elevated to the level of a quasi-religion. Just as science demands material proof as validation of its hypotheses, we often act as doubting Thomases who look for evidence of success of an endeavour in terms of the tangible outcomes it produces. In human services, the criteria of quality may include such outcomes as the successful completion of individual programme plans, the frequency of community outings, and the number of beds which are filled in a hostel. In Citizen Advocacy, whilst support provided by advocates may be practical in nature, other characteristics of citizen advocacy relationships -- such as love, friendship, acceptance, respect, and inclusion -- do not lend themselves easily to statistical documentation. In defiance of the popular yardstick of material or clinical outcomes, Citizen Advocacy remains an intangible, ethereal response.
5. Whereas our society tends to subscribe to the view that big is better, Citizen Advocacy is a small-scale, low-key, helping form.
Our culture predisposes us to equate "bigger" with "better," as mirrored in the commercial advertisers' use of prefixes such as "super," "mega," and the like -- to the point of reducing such words to clichés. In the human services, the fixation with grandness can be seen in such manifestations as ever-swelling budgets ("more money will solve the problem"), large buildings, armies of workers, and self-congratulatory hyperbole about the magnitude of its achievements. Citizen advocacy programmes, on the other hand, typically have small budgets, few paid staff, and modest offices. Indeed, Citizen Advocacy is not to be found in the office, but in the relationships established by the programme which continue to grow in the community. Citizen Advocacy thus lives, imperceptibly, in the community.
It can be sobering to reflect on the realities which confront Citizen Advocacy. However, that realisation must not be the cause for despair. Instead, those of us in the Citizen Advocacy movement must draw comfort, even inspiration, from the demonstrable truth that there are people who will respond to the needs of their fellow citizens, even though they have no prior responsibility to do so, and for which they will not receive external or material rewards. By retaining such a faith and bringing it to life in our work, we can ensure that despite swimming against the tide, Citizen Advocacy will not sink into oblivion.