Just like targeted dollars and strategically deployed volunteers, advocacy can help bring your strategies to life.
Advocacy can inform opinion leaders about reading challenges in your community, educating parents about how to support young children’s pre-reading skills or enlist policy makers to support literacy efforts.
Think About Advocacy in Two Distinct Ways:
- “Small a” advocacy – which is educating and informing. This could be raising public awareness, educating parents and caregivers or informing leaders about the reading challenges and opportunities in your community. Advertising, media relations, Speaker’s Bureaus, editorial columns, etc. are forms of “small a” advocacy.
- “Big A” advocacy – which is contacting policy makers to express your opinion, like emailing legislators to express support for early childhood education funding that helps young kids build language and literacy skills.
Either version of advocacy is a critical piece of making lasting community change. Changing laws, regulations, budgets or other policies is part of advocacy, along with the work your coalition is doing to elevate the issue of early grade reading to people across the community.
If your board has not taken an active policy stance before, you may need to invest additional time during your strategy development phase on this issue and help them understand that even the best programmatic changes may result in marginal improvements and not help the kids who need the most intensive interventions. For that kind of significant increase in early grade reading proficiency, it is likely that policy will need to be changed at the state or local level. Check out United Way Worldwide’s advocacy and policy guide for tips, tools and templates on launching or building advocacy or public policy efforts.
A critical piece of the policy conversation has to do with data: collecting it, sharing it and using it are all policy issues, albeit at the local school district level. Data can have a lasting impact on how schools create regulations and processes to increase student success. Here’s one example: through a United Way Worldwide family engagement project funded by AT&T, the United Way of Southern Cameron County in Brownsville, TX asked the high school for help in identifying the students at risk of not graduating from high school. School leaders believed those students were low-income, with limited English proficiency and behavioral problems. However, a close study of 8th and 9th grade records for seniors in 2010 showed the predictors to be low attendance (specifically, more than seven absences during 8th grade) and failing two or more sections of the 8th grade assessment. As a result of seeing this data, the school began changing the way they sought out 9th graders for an intensive remediation program during the school year.
These issues are complex, so think about how to ensure your partners and key supporters are comfortable with the details. Briefings, fact sheets and regular feedback loops are important ways to enlist and enroll partners (especially non-experts) in the foundational issues of advocacy and policy work.
Education policy is mostly made at the state and local level. Work with your coalition to determine all the ways the strategies you’ve identified can be activated. For example, if one of your early grade reading strategies is to provide support to students struggling with reading in kindergarten through third grades, your coalition may petition the county commissioners to allocate more reading support staff to K-3 classrooms in high-risk elementary schools. You may advocate with state legislators to support early literacy program funding in Pre-K classrooms or you may work with the principals, teachers and parents of those schools to pursue a Success for All grant designed to increase reading achievement, cut the achievement gap between African Americans, Hispanic and white students and prepare teachers to support the needs of English learners.
Because every state is required to have a statewide literacy plan (under the state Department of Education), your early grade reading coalition should find out what the current plan says. Start with the Early Learning Council in your state. States have submitted plans for a federal program establishing state-level councils to “improve coordination and collaboration among a wide array of early childhood programs and services.” The statewide literacy plan signals what state school leaders feel is important in literacy, but because kids are in school only 20 percent of their waking hours, school isn’t the only venue for learning. For that reason, it’s critical that your coalition be part of this conversation.
Mile High United Way in Denver is leading statewide efforts to engage people in Community Conversations around early grade reading, including a statewide bus tour CEO Christine Benero recently completed with Colorado’s Lieutenant Governor, Joe Garcia. Those conversations will be informing the state early grade reading policy agenda. Watch a video about the bus tour here and consider how you could adapt it to your community, region or state.
Although every state is different, take a look at the state of Colorado’s initial Literacy Action Plan, considered by some national leaders to be a model for state-level literacy policy. You may also want to download the United Way Legislative Brief on Early Grade Reading for United Way Worldwide’s point of view on federal issues impacting the issue.
Of course, advocacy is part of what your early grade reading coalition may be focused on, but it’s also a chance to engage the participants of your Community Conversations, employees in workforce campaigns and affinity groups.
Think about how advocacy can support your individual engagement strategies as well. After your strategies are developed and it’s clear which pieces can be fueled by advocacy, think about how to deploy individuals as advocates to enact your strategies. In addition to multiple rounds of community conversations, possible activities to support your early grade reading agenda might include:
Here are some things people can do on their own if you can provide the context, tools and links (some suggestions for those supports are in parentheses):
- Learn more about reading challenges facing kids (create a one-pager or web copy using United Way Worldwide's chapter on early grade reading here, or send them to the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading site).
- Post to your community (Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest followers) about getting involved to support education.
- Thank a great teacher from your school days.
- Vote for candidates who are committed to education.
- Raise your voice for public funding of literacy programs in your local schools.
- Raise your voice to support summer learning.
- Agree to educate legislators about the importance of early grade reading by emailing, texting or writing them.
Remember that your workforce campaigns might be the best place to start or build your advocacy campaign if you have cultivated the CEO and other corporate executives as well as individual employees in the importance of early grade reading and the critical role advocacy plays to create real, sustainable change. Download tips for using advocacy to engage individuals. Also, think about how other organizations have tapped into individual passions to fuel an action agenda. Download this national case study of MADD’s work, MADD-Secrets to Success, for some insight and ideas.
Attendance and Advocacy
When it comes to advocating for policy to support tracking of school attendance, Attendance Works has a range of tips and tools to help your United Way impact school policy. Smart policy and implementation can ensure schools and communities collect, monitor and share attendance data. They can also motivate key stakeholders to work together to promote a culture of regular school attendance and intervene when chronic absence is a problem.
Advocating for better public policy can take a variety of forms including building awareness of the importance of chronic absence, influencing policy implementation, seeking regulatory change and advancing legislation. For example, in May 2013, California advocacy groups sponsored a policy forum on chronic absence, drawing about 174 local and state policy makers.
