Finding the Gaps
When you begin your advocacy journey its important to first identify gaps. Gaps are aspects in the community where inequalities, inequities, injustices, disparities, or areas of lacking are present. A gap can be your school using styrofoam instead of paper trays, thus they are lacking in conservation mindedness. Or it can be inequitable and unjust juvenile justice policies. It is your responsibility to identify the gaps in your community or state and come up with plans to address those gaps. Sometimes examining gaps can be hard! There are many ways to examine the gaps in your community! Sometimes you will experience the inequalities or see these inequalities happen first hand. Other times you will have to do research and put time and effort into learning about the inequalities throughout your school, city, or state. This can be difficult, however, amplified has a research guide to help make this part of the advocacy process a little easier! Youth-led Participatory Action Research is a method of community-based research that youth partake in. Amplified highly encourages youth to use YPAR prior to their advocacy efforts. To learn more about YPAR visit this link.
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When identifying what gaps in the community you want to address be cognizant of the fact that you cant address everything at once! It will take many different steps and you may not solve everything you wanted to or do everything you intended. That's okay! What's important is that you are reasonable about what you want to achieve and are trying your best to better the community!