Using Independent Living as a Marketing Tool

Two basic tenets of independent living are full participation and consumer control. Advocacy is an essential part of ensuring full participation and gaining or re-establishing consumer control. While NO ONE lives totally free from reliance on others, and NO ONE has complete control over their lives, advocacy gives us tools to make decisions which affect our ability to participate and live as we choose.

Understand Marketing and Advocacy

Selling or Promoting a Choice.  Advocacy is a form of Marketing to convince someone to buy a product. In this case the product is your needs, a new policy, a service or an improvement in something. Marketing's goal is to make the deal as attractive as possible so that the "buyer" (the system) will want to purchase it. The marketing approach applies well to social and political change where many politicians or government workers are to be convinced as opposed to a single individual.

Hint: Communication Metaphor

Many of the modern thinkers have related much of our lives to the way we communicate. How we listen, or do not listen, how we express our ideas, and how others interpret our verbal and non verbal behaviour are all part of communication. Theorists also say that our personalities directly impact how we interact with the world. Advocacy in this approach can be best understood as making your needs clear and asserting the rights you have through oral and written communication.

What are your strengths and weaknesses?

1. What are you good at?
2. Knowing yourself?
3. Knowing what you need and deserve
4. Knowing the law
5. What are my weak areas
6. Need to improve or learn: communication skills, reading and writing
7. Patience and tolerance, negotiation, using the lawAble to read and write

Need support or assistance to:

1. Understand my own needs and wants, understand my rights and the law
2. Talking with authorities, being assertive
3. Able to communicate well
4. Assertive and persistent