The Theory
Resilient Advocacy is a framework that adopts a trauma-informed and antiracist approach and encourages greater resilience of the advocates and impacted communities. This approach consists of four key elements:
- Awareness. Advocates must develop an awareness of trauma and the various levels of racism that may impact our clients, colleagues, communities, and ourselves.
- Collaboration. As taught in community and movement lawyering disciplines, advocates must engage deeply with the communities and clients we serve and act as creative accomplices.
- Adapt Strategically. Advocates must constantly evaluate and reevaluate strategies in our advocacy using a multidisciplinary systems-theory approach, both to ensure effectiveness and to adapt to changes impacting our work.
- Transform the Trauma Response. Finally, to preserve our own capacity as passionate advocates who care deeply about our work, we must learn how to recognize our own trauma exposure response warning signs and transform our trauma exposure responses with multilevel resilience.
The training
We share our work through training modules through which we guide advocates from theory to action, with real world hypotheticals and case studies built from our experiences as attorneys, advocates, and nonprofit workers. Through our modules, advocates will learn new concepts, tools, and frameworks and practice the material in carefully curated interactive activities and small group discussions. Our training modules have been meticulously designed based on feedback from legal advocates already doing the work to make sure our approach is relevant and replicable. Based on this feedback and analysis, our training modules build on the following topics:
- Resilient Advocacy - an overarching review of the Resilient Advocacy framework
- Trauma-Informed, Inclusive Communication Strategies - communication strategies for dealing with conflict, tension, and overwhelm, using hypotheticals reflective of experiences internal and external to legal services and advocacy organizations
- Resilient Leadership & Supervision - leadership and supervision tools and frameworks with special consideration for the complexities that arise when work is rapid response, high trauma-facing, high volume, or occurring in collaborative spaces with diverse participants.
- Organizational Transformation & Design - strategies to begin transforming organizational architecture, policies, practices, workflows, and other components to empower colleague to engage in work more sustainably that does not cause harm.