Advocacy Activities

Two Advocacy Activities for the intense need to push forward with engaging, interactive work to simulate real world circumstances and bring critical dialogue capable of inspiring and educating to the forefront.

Promoting the Positive (a direct action review): Rather than direct action exclusively based on obstruction, our Direct Action will encourage participation with the positive alternative. To do this the class will:
1.  Review a few historical or modern direct actions and how they highlighted the issue.
2. Brainstorm positive health sites in community (corner stores, grocery stores, playgrounds, community center, etc.)
3. Write each site on different piece of posterboard paper and hang each one in a different area of the room.
***Provide direct action props, like: posters, bull horn, drums, banners, etc.
4. Designate particular groups of students for each site and ask them to develop a direct action to promote the positive aspects of the site.
5. After 10 minutes ask students to present their direct action shemes.
6. Explain to students we will have two direct action lightning rounds.
7. Give groups two more rounds of direct action creation at the following site, but allow them only 2 minutes to develop the campaign. 
8. Following lightning presentations, hold conversation about purpose of direct actions and the value of demonstrating against the negative and promoting the positive.



Acting Advocates: We will study and implement different techniques for persuasion through quick role play. The teacher will call out different audiences (made up of homogenous professionals) and the students' goal is to quickly persuade depending on the lean of the audiences.
1. Teacher call out the following audiences to persuade in at most 20-30 seconds:
      A. Politicians
      B. Doctors
      C. Business People
      E. Parents

2. Students will be randomly chosen to persuade the audience.
3. After each round the chosen techniques of persuasion will be analyzed and talked about as a whole.