Distance Learning Is A Game Changer

Our online advocacy course provides practical instruction focused on how to use our Advocacy Toolkit to create and implement policy advocacy activities. We initially developed the course to provide an opportunity to test the toolkit and gain valuable feedback to ensure that the materials are appropriate, resonate with youth-led and youth-serving advocates, and can be effectively used with other practitioners to build knowledge and working competencies for the design and implementation of advocacy actions in line with the toolkit.

For each course session, there are pre-assigned readings and many of the sessions feature lecture, guest speakers, and question and answer time. Course work is assigned for each session and is a required component of the course. The course content is easily adaptable to a wide variety of themes.

We first developed and piloted the course for the USAID-funded Community, Family and Youth Resilience (CFYR) Program, which supports vulnerable youth ages 10-29 and is being implemented in fifteen communities in Guyana, Saint Lucia, and St. Kitts and Nevis. Using an evidence-based, public-health approach, CFYR provides targeted interventions to youth at varying degrees of risk. The goal of USAID’s CFYR is to empower youth ages 10-29 to become productive citizens and make positive contributions to society.

In the summer of 2020, Common Ground was engaged to lead two additional cohorts of the 12-week course, providing us with a wealth of additional feedback and the ability to continue improving the course. Those sessions lead to the development of a 9-hour, quick-impact version of the course specifically for youth-service professionals. Three cohorts were trained using this model in the early fall of 2020.

The objectives of this web-based curriculum are to build knowledge and working competencies to:

• Formulate clear youth-led and youth-centered advocacy approaches on a selected issue or theme;
• Develop and implement youth-centered advocacy campaigns informed by data; and
• Identify and engage partnership arrangements and techniques necessary for effective advocacy outcomes.

At the end of the course, participants are able to:

• Recognize whether an advocacy issue is relevant to achieving progress on a specific issue or theme;
• Use evidence and data as a guide to develop advocacy and action initiatives with youth-led and youth-serving agencies; and
• Create an advocacy campaign directly related to a specific issue or theme, using a range of essential tools, including, but not limited to: framing an issue, strategy development, stakeholder analysis and engagement, communications, monitoring, and evaluation.