Advocacy for All
What do you want to change in this life? Advocacy is perhaps one of the key points that can help us in the issues we want to change in this life. Advocacy is a term in which we emphasize change in order to support a purpose in areas such as politics, health, rights and education, to ensure that another person supports it, and to draw attention to the issue. At the same time advocacy is all the work carried out in order to achieve one of the purposes of speaking, representing, acting on behalf of herself/himself or a group of individuals, achieving or protecting a certain goal.
People advocate for equality, fairness and the benefit of society in whatever area they want change in the country in which they live. Nevertheless, change does not happen immediately, time is needed for change to occur. Advocacy also takes time and it has a lot of work and elements in advocacy. It takes time for the issues we defend to come to a conclusion or to be resolved. During this process, you plan what to do, and you meet with decision-makers. We demand a change in policies. This also takes time. Besides this long process, it is also important not to remain silent during the process for advocacy. To be able to make a voice for something, to stand side by side for situations that we want to change, to create awareness about the issue in the society and to make the subject you defend become the center of attention brings the issue you defend one step forward.
In order to fulfill its advocacy purpose, communities and organizations organize campaigns. Campaigns aim not only for policy change but also for attitude change. In this context, communities or individuals campaign for advocacy on any issue for humans, animals. One of these campaigns is the Jubilee 2000 Campaign. In this advocacy context, the center of the campaign is people-oriented and the debts erase campaign. It was created for the campaign to erase the foreign debt of the poor countries because the communities were disturbed at the summit in Cologne that the promise of 100 billion dollars of foreign debt of the world's poorest 40 countries was not kept, so a campaign was launched to flood the world leaders with messages via the Internet. The advocacy here is completely human-focused and a campaign of people who want a certain system to change.
Another campaign is to take a step against torture. It was started in 2000 by Amnesty International in more than twenty countries. The theme of the campaign is torture. Despite many international conventions on the subject, torture and ill-treatment are used in many countries to obtain information, punish and pressure society. Therefore, a campaign against torture was launched and positive results were obtained. The actions initiated through the website www.stoptorture.org created within the campaign helped many victims to escape from torture.
Another campaign is 46664. Mandela started this campaign. During his twenty-seven years of prison life, Mandela was called inmate number 46664. Calling by number is a strategy used by the apartheid regime to humiliate opponents. Mandela named this number, which has a great meaning for him, for the campaign he launched in 2002 with the message "Give me a minute of your life to stop AIDS." The aim of the campaign is to create a world free of HIV / AIDS. Raising awareness on HIV / AIDS, drawing attention to this problem, ensuring the determination of appropriate policies to overcome the problem. This campaign has had an extremely successful impact all over the world with the support of celebrities. Concerts were organized and enlightening speeches were made on HIV / AIDS.
Advocacy is a very important issue in order to create a better world for all of us. If we want to create change, we have to start somewhere and use our voices. As long as we demand changes in policies that will implement our rights we defend, advocacy will continue. As long as human beings exist, they will exist in advocacy.
