Advocacy training for non-advocates

Today I ran the second of three pilot training sessions for Connexions West Yorkshire. The title of the training was 'Practical advocacy techniques for working with young people'.

This seemed to go very well although I felt surprisingly exhausted when I got back to my office - maybe the stress of maintaining a relaxed attitude together with closely concentrating on doing a good job and remembering everything. (The worst moment was when I plugged in the projector and it didn't come on, solved after five minutes of sweating by plugging it into a different socket of the extension cable...)

In some ways though I think providing this sort of training is more controversial than writing about police racism, certainly as far as the advocacy community is concerned. We know that racism in the police ranges somewhere between 'endemic' (mostly in the past) to the (much lesser) 'still institutional' or 'getting better'. When we find examples we feel a need to speak out about them, but the only people who seem to be surprised, upset, or even interested, are the police themselves.

Training Connexions PAs in advocacy techniques on the other hand, now that's a serious matter. Despite the fact that I stressed again and again that my trainees could never be real independent advocates during working hours, only benefit from the techniques, one of them still asked the killer question: if it's difficult to fund pure advocacy, couldn't trained PAs fill the gap?

No, no, no. I keep on hearing good things about the local Connexions and the Young People's Service, but they will always be more influenced by local and national government policies and demands than most advocates. Thus they can never be fully independent - free from conflicts of interest.

I do think that the methods and the principles of advocacy should be spread as far as possible, and we should encourage more diverse approaches to providing people with advocacy support, especially more people in community settings. But if Connexions see the need for this training, this should indicate more need for proper sustainable funding for real independent advocacy projects.

I'd be interested in peoples thoughts and comments on this.