Training Course: Advocacy Skills

What is advocacy? Advocate for whom? For what purpose? And are the benefits sustainable?

According to the Vietnamese Dictionary (source: Wiktionary), to defend is to defend what is being condemned.

Looking at the positive: Advocacy is to protect the rights in a reasonable and legitimate way against an event or a problem for an individual or group. The purpose is to obtain or achieve that which is beneficial to the life of that individual or group. Through the process and results achieved, it will be a solid premise and bring good influence to future beneficial advocacy plans and campaigns. Further, it contributes to building a fair society.

Looking in the opposite direction: Justifying wrong actions, covering up plans and actions that harm the community, will of course not bring anything sustainable to the individual, to the collective, to the community and to society.

So, do we need defense? How do we know how to “advocate”?

This is a skill that needs to be guided, studied, practiced and experienced so that individuals or groups can protect themselves, by planning to defend and implement the plan in the most correct way, bringing good results for the community.

Seeing the importance of advocating for the disabled community, who lack many things in life, in order to fully integrate into the community, Caritas Dalat office in conjunction with Seur Diem Huong organized a training course on "Advocacy Skills for persons with disabilities" last April 11 at the hall of Dalat Pastoral Center. The course includes 60 participants, mainly persons with disabilities, from 8 different Associations in Lam Dong.

With the hope of helping improve knowledge and practice skills about Advocacy, Seur Diem Huong has prepared a very detailed and easy-to-understand content, to help the Association of persons with disabilities solidify their knowledge and resilient skills, to protect themselves and their collectives and communities.

Theory coupled with practice helps participants excitedly participate. 60 participants, divided into eight groups for group consultation. “Creating a group” is also part of advocacy skills, because when advocating, people need the strength of the collective.

Please read more documents here:

http://www.caritasdalat.org/2022/04/bien-ho-trong-cong-tac-xa-hoi.html

“Policy research, lobbying, holding meetings etc.” are some of the methods used in advocacy. The groups focused on listening and following every word the instructor shared. Therefore, when asked where to go, each group answered very quickly and accurately. Furthermore, all groups completed the assigned exercises on-site very well.

The compliments and congratulations from the lecturers and from the participants created encouragement for everyone. The questions and exercises in the training session certainly remained in the hearts of each participant as a spiritual gift in life, which brothers and sisters with disabilities received in addition to the useful knowledge in this training session.

Hopefully, through this training session, our disabled brothers and sisters will have more motivation in their lives.