Advocacy-
proactive action for change

Mary Krebs, MS, MPPM

Community Strategy Partners

Advocacy plays a crucial role in enhancing the well-being of older adults through strategic approaches such as relationship building, power mapping, messaging, and effective communication. By advocating for the needs and rights of older adults, advocates can influence policies, programs, and societal attitudes, ensuring that individuals and communities receive the support they deserve. 

What is considered advocacy and why should we care?

Relationship Building

Building relationships with community partners allows for collaboration and collective action, amplifying the voices of older adults in decision-making processes. 

Relationship building in community advocacy involves creating strong, trusting connections with individuals, organizations, and partners who share common goals. It’s about fostering collaboration, understanding, and mutual support. This skill is crucial because advocacy efforts are more effective when backed by united partnerships. Fostering strong relationships enables better communication, resource sharing, and coordinated actions, amplifying the impact of community advocacy work. This process also helps to build credibility and sustain long-term engagement, ensuring that efforts to create positive change are supported by a broad base of committed allies. Ultimately, strong relationships are the foundation for achieving lasting, meaningful change.

Mapping Power Relationships in the Community

Power mapping for community advocacy involves identifying and analyzing key partners and decision-makers within a community or organization. As a beneficial strategic tool, its primary goal is to help connectors understand the relationships, influence, and interests of various individuals and groups that can impact policy beneficial to older residents. Who are the key decision makers in your area?

Decisionmakers_graphic.pdf

Learning More about Decision-Makers Graphic

Using this graphic to identify key decision makers relevant to your situation, reflect on how to organize their level of influence in opposition or in support of positive change. After you have listed potential opponents / proponents by high / low level of influence, it is time to list them on the map to create a visual representation of power partners and key decision-makers important in your community. Plan for action in relationship building using the diagram to the right for mapping out the relationships and power dynamics clearly.

Power Mapping Activity Download.pdf

Advocacy Reflection - Power Mapping

Click here to complete the first of three reflections in this chapter. Completing the reflections will also record your progress.

Policy Analysis

Ever wonder what alternatives decision-makers are weighing? Want insights into the best path forward for achievable goals? Basic policy analysis can answer these questions and is a crucial skill for age-friendly community initiatives. This process helps assess existing policy alignment with the needs of older adults, helps to identify gaps, and facilitates proposed changes to enhance accessibility, health services, and social inclusion. It ensures that communities can effectively implement strategies that promote the well-being and quality of life for their aging populations.

In this video presentation we discuss steps in the process to identify successful approaches to issue areas by learning more about what others have done in other geographic areas to facilitate positive change. By watching this brief presentation, you will learn skills to apply in your own problem-solving and decision making.

Messaging & Communication around Advocacy

Advocacy - Reflective Practice: Learning to Craft a Powerful & Effective Message

Crafting a powerful and effective message for community advocacy involves clarity, emotional appeal, and a strong call to action. The message should be concise, easy to understand, and focused on a specific issue or goal. Use simple language that resonates with the community’s values and experiences. Emotional appeal is crucial; stories or examples that evoke empathy or a sense of urgency can make the message more impactful. Finally, a strong call to action directs the audience on how they can contribute or get involved, making it clear what steps they should take to support the cause.

By clearly communicating the community's needs and proposed solutions, advocacy efforts are more likely to result in meaningful change. The power of a good message lies in its ability to inspire collective action, build momentum, and sustain long-term engagement.

Effective messaging is important because it unites people around a common cause and motivates them to take action. A well-crafted message can raise awareness, influence public opinion, and garner support from key partners, including policymakers. 

Activity - Craft a Powerful & Effective Message

Use the Reflective Practice in Advocacy, Learning to Craft a Powerful and Effective Message to craft a powerful and effective message of your own.

As you craft your message, think about these key questions:


Reflective Practice in Advocacy-download.pdf

Advocacy Reflection - Messaging

Reflect on your experience crafting an advocacy message. How did you identify a story that resonates with key decison-makers? What community values and beliefs did you tap into to persuade others to support your cause? Click here to complete the second of three reflections in this chapter. Completing the reflections will also record your progress.

Advocacy Done By Us For Us

One gold standard of advocacy is "nothing for you without you." Age-friendly teams may organize older community members to advocate for state or local policy changes. They may also bring residents together to advocate for changes in the way programs, services, and activities are administered or funded. Even though age-friendly initiatives are most often grassroots, there is still a power difference between people on the team and people living in the community. It is critical that we keep our focus on being inclusive, making sure that community members of all abilities and a range of life experience have a voice in determining what age-friendly looks like in their community. 

Advocacy Reflection - Equipping for Self-Advocacy

How do we equip older community members of all abilities and with a range of life experiences to advocate for themselves as people with a right to contribute to our communities and be as engaged in community life as they want? How do we create space for community members to advocate for what matters beyond policy changes? For example, how can age-friendly support personal advocacy by a community member living with dementia who wants to make their home more dementia-friendly? Who wants to form a social group of other people living with cognitive changes? In your reflection, consider how you can support a person's advocacy, not solving the "problem" for them but supporting and equipping.

Click here to complete the final reflection in this chapter and record successful completion of the Advocacy chapter.

Additional Resources

Maine State Department of Health & Human Services. Advocacy Resources, State of Maine, Department of Health & Human Services, Office of Aging & Disability Services

An array of resources are available to assist you in ensuring your voice is heard, knowing your rights, keeping your benefits, and making a complaint. Guardians, family members, or case managers can also use these resources to help you.


Advocacy. The Commons: Social Change Library.

Whatever our path to advocacy and building people power, there comes a time in most campaigns where we need to engage directly with decision makers. Here you’ll find the practical information you need (like how to contact MPs), tips for effective advocacy, training materials and policy reports.


Cormac Russell. Sustainable community development: shifiting the focus from what's wrong to what's strong.
This two-page document describes a succinct guide to Community Development approaches helpful in working as an advocate in your community. By building on the strengths and capacities of the people who come to you seeking help, not only will the person be in the driver-seat when they access resources (which is critical for someone to receive help) but community will be stronger. 


State Representative from your district. Find Your Acting State Legislator

Elected officials are at your service to field questions and assist with challenges experienced tby their constituents. Proactively introducing yourself and building a relationship with those in state leadership roles can be helpful in the future.


State Senator from your district. Find Your State Senator

Elected officials are at your service to field questions and assist with challenges experienced tby their constituents. Proactively introducing yourself and building a relationship with those in state leadership roles can be helpful in the future.


Meet Your Chapter Guide - Mary Krebs

Mary Krebs, MS, MPPM is the founder of Community Strategy Partners and a consulting member of the Lifelong Maine team. She has managed projects since 2012 conducting research focused on a wide variety of policy issues important to families and communities. Since 2019, Mary has served as a team member at UMass Boston's Gerontology Institute and the Collins Center for Public Management to assist over 20 municipalities in addressing challenges to livability experienced by older adults. Her passion is to develop age-friendly action planning for improved vibrant communities. 

During this chapter, we reviewed key skills and a few tools for advocacy.
If you have any questions as you are going through the material, please email: lifelong@maine.edu.