What is Self-Advocacy?

Self advocacy is people with learning difficulties speaking up for ourselves. Self advocacy is important because many people with learning difficulties spend their lives being told what to do. If you are always told what to do and never listened to you can get to the point where you don’t even know how to make a decision for yourself. Speaking up is something people with learning difficulties need support to learn to do and other people need to learn how to understand us.

Self advocacy has taken forward the idea that people with learning difficulties need to be listened to. Professionals and carers who run services for people with learning difficulties should ask us what we want because no one knows better than us ourselves.

Self advocacy groups are for people with learning difficulties to meet and

• share their experiences
• support each other
• learn to speak up
• find out about their rights
• speak up to local services about what is important to them

There are local self advocacy groups all across the country but groups are all different and often have problems with not enough money and not enough support.

People First believes that more money should be put into self advocacy. Self advocacy can change lives and all people with learning difficulties should have access to it.  

People First also believes that self advocacy groups need to be user led, which means they should be fully run and controlled by people with learning difficulties ourselves. This way self advocacy groups are doing exactly what we tell other services to do – give us the same chances as everyone else to have responsibility and jobs to be treated with respect.

People First (Self Advocacy) is user led. We show society how much people with learning difficulties can do if we are given the chance. We also work out good ways to support people with learning difficulties that we are happy to share. Being user led is not always easy – things take us longer and we have to be constantly thinking about the best ways to support each other as well as thinking about the work we need to do. We are very proud of what we achieve and how powerful it is for people to see people with learning difficulties running an organisation themselves – it changes people’s whole expectations about what people with learning difficulties can do.

Self advocacy is sometimes said to only be for people with low support needs. Everyone can make a choice and everyone has their own likes, dislikes and outlook, and self advocacy groups do need to get better at finding ways to include the voices of people who do not use words and might not even be able to understand pictures, but the principles of self advocacy apply to all people with learning difficulties: that people should be supported to communicate, given choice and control over their own lives and be treated with respect. Self advocacy groups do not only include people with low support needs. What does happen is that through self advocacy people’s support needs get lower. Once people start to be treated with respect and given responsibilities, they become more independent and find out just how much they can do for themselves. People’s whole lives change through self advocacy. 

What do we mean by people with learning difficulties? >>

Why learning difficulty and not learning disability? >>

 

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