The reality is, when you’re advocating, thing won’t always go as planned. You have your goal and your plan for getting there, but then there are setbacks.
Quite often, change can take longer than you want it to. The decision-maker you are advocating to may have many competing priorities and getting your issue to the top of their list can be challenging. Sometimes, unforeseen circumstances can occur, like an emergency, and your issue gets deprioritized while they address their circumstances.
Sometimes, even with your best efforts, you don’t get the result you wanted. The decision-maker disagrees with you on the issue, puts a different solution in place, or is unwilling to even have the conversation.
When you have a setback in your advocacy efforts, here are some steps to take:
- Keep perspective: Remember that advocacy is a long-term process. Just because you haven’t seen the results you expected, doesn’t mean that you won’t succeed. Don’t give up the first time you have a setback. For example, it took advocates years to have accessibility legally protected in Ontario, but eventually, the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act became law. Without persistence, these disability advocates wouldn’t have gotten the result they wanted!
- Take a break: If you’ve experienced some disappointing news or if things are just stalled, it might be time for a break. This doesn’t mean abandoning your advocacy altogether, but just taking a step back temporarily. A break can give you the space to recharge your energy so that you can re-engage with your advocacy with a new sense of purpose and perhaps a new approach you hadn’t thought of before.
- Reflect and re-evaluate: After you’ve taken a break to recharge, you may want to reflect on your efforts to date. Ask yourself, or a trusted friend, these questions:
- What has been working well?
- What has not been working well?
- Is there a strategy you haven’t tried?
- Is there a different decision-maker you could appeal to?
- Is there a new ally you can engage?
- Change course, if needed: Based on your reflection, you may want to re-evaluate your advocacy plan and change course. By starting down a slightly different path, you can be re-energized and test out new ideas to see if they’re more effective.
- Press pause for longer: Sometimes, as frustrating as it is, it is just not the right time for the change you want to make. If you’ve explored every avenue and had no success, it might be time to take a longer break and revisit your advocacy on this issue at a future date, when circumstances have changed. This is not necessary in most cases, but sometimes it is a needed step so that you don’t burn out by trying the same thing over and over again.
