Citizen Action

Individual Self-Advocacy, Leadership Development, Citizen Participation

Focusing sharply on decisions and asking good questions are essential skills for effective self-advocacy and citizen action. They are, however, two skills that are rarely taught.

In many communities around the country, citizen action efforts promoting individual self-advocacy, leadership development and citizen participation find that RQP’s educational strategy quickly leads to great motivation to take action, better skills and more effective action.
Citizens using RQP skills to take action for the first time, also discover the importance of expanding the skill base of their entire community. They move from being spokespeople on behalf of their community to informal educators who see the need to teach RQP methods to their neighbors and communities, so that more people can:

• Participate in decision-making processes that affect them and their communities
• Encourage more widespread participation among people who have traditionally not been part of community efforts
• Hold local elected officials accountable
• Using the new skills in order to advocate for themselves and their families also leads to a discovery that there are decisions that affect them made on many levels of public institutions and government. An observer of a group of women in a welfare program (TANF) in New Hampshire who used RQP, commented that once they learned there was a way decisions should be made, they began to see new possibilities:

The women in the program began to take action in new ways because they now had the power to ask how the decision is made.

Another group of women in a housing project in southern New Hampshire used their RQP skills to question some of the practices of the New Hampshire Division of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF). State officials were so impressed by the way the women were raising important questions and advocating for themselves that they invited them to join a process for producing information that parents need to know about their rights in any investigation process. Soon after, the women became resources for the state agency in efforts to improve working relationships with all parents entering the system and to make its own decision-making processes more transparent. RQP had, as Lynn Cutler of the NH Department of Health and Human Services wrote: provided…the methodology for imparting advocacy skills to parents. Their effective advocacy then led to significant changes in the entire system.

Finding their Voice

At the request of The Boston Foundation, RQP developed a training on "Active Citizenship and Political Empowerment" that was part of a Community Building Curriculum. Our training was successfully piloted in Dorchester and Roxbury, MA where some participants who had never been to a public meeting before described how the process helped them discover the value of their ideas and the importance of participation. One participant put it simply: I discovered I had an opinion, and that made it easier to take the first step towards getting involved.

In 2007, two years after Hurricane Katrina struck The Gulf Coast, The Neighborhoods Partnership Network in New Orleans invited RQP to work with neighborhood leaders so they could participate more effectively in decision-making on the neighborhood, municipal, state and federal levels that seemed to give them a role, but limited their input. Residents and neighborhood leaders wanted not just to participate in large planning processes but to know better how to hold elected officials accountable. Participants in the RQP training learned to break down overwhelming issues into specific decisions they could identify and try to influence. One community leader, Sylvia of the St. Roc neighborhood described the skills she learned from RQP as a gift that can help us advocate for ourselves and motivate other people in the neighborhood to join in.

The Center for Collaborative Planning and its regional network based in Sacramento, CA has been teaching the RQP strategy as part of a coalition-building effort to address needs of low-income families in many of California’s poorest counties. Faye Kennedy, Program Associate at the Center, has observed the changes she’s observed in residents and parents who have participated in RQP workshops. RQP, she says, helps people find their own voice.

Hear the perspective of people around the country who have taught and learned to focus on decisions and ask their own questions: Voices from the Field