I am a social work student in Canada and my partner is a disabled advocate in a social service agency for disabled people. My observation is that the advocacy work is split into individual advocacy and system advocacy. The individual advocacy involves assisting people to obtain entitlements such as medical equipment, income assistance, home support services, etc. The system advocacy involves lobbying various levels of government to improve accessibility, services, etc. In my experience, the individual advocacy can quite easily take over so that there is very little time for system advocacy. This is not ideal as sometimes more can be accomplished for a greater number of people by advocating at the system level. In Canada, there is very little funding for advocates at all so all the disabled advocates I know are overwhelmed by their workloads. On another note, I think disabled advocates are much more effective than non-disabled advocates as far as disability issues are concerned. Meetings with government staff seem to have a much different (and better!) tone when a disabled advocate is present as compared to a non-disabled one.
Fiona Lewis
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