Citizen Advocacy Organisations - Key Principles

Key Principles

The founding principles behind the work of a Citizen Advocacy organisation include many focused on protecting the personal nature of the relationships created:

• The benefits to the 'valued' person should be personal (i.e. they benefit from knowing the person they are introduced to, not in other ways).
• The 'valued' person shouldn't see their role as being a volunteer with the organisation, but as being in a personal relationship.

There are also principles directed at ensuring that the organisation's work isn't limited by conflicting interests, and that it isn't seen to have conflicting interests:

• The organisation should be an independent one (financially and structurally).
• The organisation shouldn't be sharing offices with organisations seen to have conflicting interests.

Further principles include:

• The office staff should not be drawn into working directly with problems that the 'devalued' individuals face, because overall there will be more benefit from the time being used in the building of relationships (with ordinary 'valued' citizens who themselves - with their own friends and allies - may help the person with these problems).

Behind these principles lays the firm belief that people who are currently devalued and excluded by society are of equal worth, and very much worth knowing personally. It is seen that society as a whole will benefit from these people being fully included, and that exclusion occurs because of the social response to groups of people, not because that individual can't be included.

The work of a Citizen Advocacy organisation is fundamentally different from that of organisations that seek to help people cope with their devaluation and exclusion (in that it instead uses a practical method to ensure the person is no longer devalued and excluded). Indeed, one of the key reasons that the idea of the citizen advocacy organisation was created is that society's response to the problems of devaluation and exclusion can be to create service systems which, while trying to help, actually further exclude and devalue people.