Advocacy (n): the act or process of supporting a cause or proposal, including on behalf of the interests of a person or group of people.

Advocacy is an area of service that isn’t always clearly understood, largely because it often touches on a little bit of everything: emotional support, education about a specialized subject or legal rights, court accompaniment, safety-planning, resource referrals, and so on. It can also look different depending on an individual, an organization, or the field of interest.

Advocacy with Walnut Avenue

California state law, which labels an advocate for domestic violence survivors as a “domestic violence counselor,” defines an advocate as “a person who is employed by a domestic violence victim service organization, as defined in this article, whether financially compensated or not, for the purpose of rendering advice or assistance to victims of domestic violence and who has at least 40 hours of training as specified in paragraph (2)” (bolding ours). The full details can be viewed here.

However, “rendering advice or assistance” is a pretty broad statement. What this looks like in practice with our own advocates, whether over the hotline or in person, often includes:

Using peer counseling skills such as open-ended questions, reflective listening, emotional validation, and perspective reframing when speaking with survivors about their experience;
Providing evidence-based information about domestic violence to address common misunderstandings survivors and their allies have about domestic violence. This also provides some concrete language for survivors to use when they’re having trouble putting the experience into words;
Helping a survivor talk through the pros and cons of choices and what options are available based on what the survivor says they want and/or need;
Helping a survivor come up with a safety-plan, which is a personalized plan designed to address a survivor’s emotional and physical safety, e.g. coping safely with trauma, lowering risks of harm when living with an unsafe partner or relative, planning on how to leave, etc;
Offering information on other local services, such as shelters, food banks, mental health services, legal services, and others.

Our advocacy is based on the following principles:

Trauma-informed care: recognizing that trauma impacts people in different ways and that there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to safety-planning or healing.
Strength-based approach: every person has strengths, whether or not those strengths are recognized or celebrated, and we build on what is already there.
Self-empowerment: survivors have the right to make informed decisions about their own lives and to be an active director of their own process, which means an advocate will never tell a survivor what they “should” do.
Voluntary: participants may choose to engage with appropriate services on their own terms, within the bounds required of Walnut Avenue by law and policy.

What advocates do not do:

Provide mental health or therapeutic counseling;
Provide legal advice or representation or legally binding orders (such as a restraining order - only a judge can grant a restraining order!);
Tell a survivor what’s best for them or what the survivor should or should not do;
General case management.

Comparing Different Types of Service Provision

Social Worker

Focus: long-term physical and mental self-sufficiency
Emphasis on meeting practical needs for long-term wellness
Long-term provider/client relationship
Each meeting part of a series
Mandated reporter (conditionally)

Therapist

Focus: long-term mental health work/skill development
Emphasis on self-knowledge and safe coping skills
Long-term provider/client relationship
Each meeting part of a series
Mandated reporter

Advocate

Focus: crisis intervention, “first aid”
Emphasis on practical needs for immediate emotional/physical safety
One-time/short-term relationship
Each meeting treated as ‘new incident’
Not a mandated reporter (conditionally)

“What makes a good advocate?”

There is no single ‘type’ of person who can be an effective advocate in the same way that therapists, social workers, and other service providers have their own personalities, opinions, preferences, and individual way of relating to the world. Every advocate has strengths as well as areas that can be improved.

However, many of the most effective advocates share some common elements:

Being aware of your own triggers and other places of emotional vulnerability, and having safe coping strategies to use when those vulnerabilities are activated;
Being aware of your own prejudices and biases, being open to feedback when you misstep, and being able to apologize and move on from the misstep in a sincere, pragmatic way;
Having firm, appropriate boundaries with the people you support;
Being mindful of your own wants and needs to mitigate the risk of stress, burnout, and vicarious trauma;
Being very clear with yourself as well as with other people on what the expectations of your role of an advocate are: being aware of what you can realistically do and what you cannot, or should not, do;
Understanding where your support of a person ends and their personal work begins.

“What are the benefits of having experience as an advocate?”

Have you ever been in a position where a loved one is confiding something in you and you realize you have no idea what to say or do? Or maybe you had a well-intentioned response that ended up upsetting or hurting the other person? Yeah, we’ve all been there.

Having training and practice in peer support skills are applicable in every area of life, professional and personal alike. All of these skills, plus education on power dynamics and healthy vs. unhealthy relationships, can be implemented with family, friends, classmates, colleagues, and complete strangers. It’s common for our advocates to report that the training and experience has helped them recognize unhealthy patterns in their own relationships and work on either cutting them out or improving them for greater personal well-being. (Interestingly, Google once claimed that they preferred hiring people who had hotline experience for their customer service and human resource departments because those employees tended to fair better interacting with both customers and colleagues.)

On a more focused level, domestic violence is common enough to be categorized as a public health crisis. Statistically, every person knows multiple survivors in their life, whether or not those survivors have ever chosen to disclose their experience. Advocacy experience can help people recognize red flags in their personal dating relationships sooner, name and address unhealthy relationship dynamics, and feel more confident in responding safely and effectively when someone else chooses to disclose their experience.

An advocate who completes their volunteer commitment is also able to use Walnut Avenue as a professional or academic reference upon request.

“What if I’m not much of a ‘people person’?”

That depends on what you mean. Our advocates have a wide range of personalities: introverted and extroverted, folks who are autistic and folks who aren’t, folks who are very emotionally sensitive and folks who aren’t, and so on. We’ve had advocates who come from legal professions, STEM fields, and technical work as well as advocates from therapeutic professions, nursing, psychology, community organizing, religious groups, and other care-oriented backgrounds.

All advocates, regardless of their personality or background, should be able to act with compassion and nonjudgment while maintaining appropriate professional boundaries for the safety of both themselves and the survivors they support. These are skills that can be learned, and much of our advocacy certification training focuses on practicing these skills in a way that’s authentic to an individual’s own personality and strengths in communication.

Sometimes people who begin the training come to the realization that they don’t want to do this work after all, for a whole variety of reasons, and that’s perfectly okay too!

“Can survivors be advocates?”

Absolutely! Many people come to this kind of work because they have some kind of personal investment in seeing things change. Survivors can make some of the best advocates because they have personal understanding on the dynamics of power and abuse.

That same personal experience, however, can have its drawbacks. An advocate who doesn’t have firm personal boundaries which prevent them from taking on someone else’s story as their own is an advocate who puts both themselves and the other survivor at risk. Walnut Avenue strongly encourages survivors to be at least two years out of their own experience of domestic violence before taking on the work of an advocate for others.

Conversely, it isn’t necessary to have had domestic violence touch your life in some way to become an effective advocate.

“What if I don’t have the right answers for a survivor?”

No one does! Advocates won’t have the ‘right answers’ because the only person who can figure out what those are is the survivor. Only the survivor knows the full context of their own life. Because domestic violence is fundamentally about power and control, advocates have to be careful to avoid perpetuating the cycle of disempowerment that a survivor experiences. Even when it comes from good intentions, ‘fixing’ or ‘white-knighting’ is just another way of taking someone’s autonomy away from them. A survivor has the right to make their own choices about their own life, even when we personally disagree with it.

An advocate’s job is to provide the kind of space where a survivor is able to feel whatever emotions they’re feeling (which are often many and conflicting, and may sometimes seem counterintuitive to another person) without being judged for them, and to help a survivor talk through the options and choices available to them. When an advocate isn’t sure how to respond, they simply ask the survivor directly: “What kind of support would be most helpful for you in this moment?”

Becoming an Advocate

For more information on becoming an advocate yourself, visit our training’s page on our website to learn more!

Walnut Avenue offers the California state certification training for advocacy twice a year, beginning in April and October. Each round of training totals approximately 49 hours, spread over 7 days in total, and is free of cost. Folks interested in the training must first register according to the directions on the training page (link above), which provides more information and a live Q&A to ensure fully informed consent. The training dates, the curriculum, and registration are all available through the website link above as well.

Questions about being an advocate or about the advocacy certification training?

Contact the Community Engagement Coordinator, Marjorie Coffey (they/them), at mcoffey@wafwc.org.

From Our Teachers & Advocates

What does it mean to be an advocate for domestic violence crisis intervention?