Introduction to “Practical Skills for Advocating on Social Justice Issues”

Overview

Do you want to advocate on a social justice issue, whether for disability rights or some other cause? Here is a free online way to get practical skills for this. These materials include the lectures and reading materials for a course to be offered at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law during the spring term in 2027.

AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky, who developed this course and delivers the lectures in it, wants to help others to learn these practical skills, in addition to those University of Ottawa law students who take the course. We are therefore posting these here. You don’t get any university credit here! You just get a great chance to learn important skills.

This course uses, as the platform or illustration for learning these skills, the world of advocating for the rights of people with disabilities. It specifically addresses the example of advocating for the rights of students with disabilities in schools, who face too many disability barriers.

Who could benefit from these lectures and reading materials?

You do not need to be a law student. You can have no background or experience at all in doing social justice advocacy. This content is understandable for and useful for anyone and everyone. If you are an experienced social justice advocate, there is a great deal offered here to enhance your efforts.

This course is being taught in Canada. However the skills addressed in it are universally helpful, wherever you live.

What is available for you here?

There are 12 video-recorded lectures available on YouTube. On this site, you will find a table of contents for them, including the title of each lecture and the topics covered in each lecture. On YouTube, we also have a playlist of all 12 lectures.

In our table of contents, there are links to each lecture and to each topic within each lecture.

You can watch any one or more of these lectures, or any part of them, to learn about the topics that most interest you. Of course, the greatest benefit comes from watching them all.

These are aimed to be timeless. The tips offered in them will help even if you watch these lectures years after they were recorded.

Don’t be confused by the unusual numbering of the lectures. There are 12, but the numbering goes from 1 to 11. A twelfth lecture was added after the others, as Lecture 5.1, which is a natural follow-up to Lecture 5. So it goes Lecture 1, Lecture 2, Lecture 3, Lecture 4, Lecture 5, Lecture 5.1, Lecture 6 and so on down to Lecture 11 at the end.

We provide reading materials for each lecture. They include some which are really important, and others that are for further interest. These are all broken down in the course syllabus posted on this site. You can also download the reading materials, sorted by lecture, in a zipped file. It will unzip into a series of folders and subfolders. For each lecture, there is a folder for required reading and a separate folder for further background materials.

What topics are covered?

Lecture 1: Lawyer’s Duty to Do Social Justice Advocacy

This lecture addresses why it is essential to engage in social justice advocacy. While this lecture focuses on lawyers, its message is applicable to everyone.

Lecture 2: The World of Social Justice and People with Disabilities

This lecture sets the stage for the rest of the lectures, by describing the world of living with a disability, including the inequalities people with disabilities too often face.

Lecture 3: Negotiating for a Community, not a Client

This lecture explores the challenges, opportunities and important strategies when advocating for a community or a sector of society, rather than for an individual. This includes identifying for whom the social justice advocate is going to speak and in what role, and the tactical and strategic considerations flowing from these choices.

Lecture 4: What to Ask for During Social Justice Advocacy

This lecture investigates the important activity of figuring out what to advocate for and building support for that agenda. The rest of the lectures focus on how to advocate for that agenda.

Lecture 5: The Social Justice Advocacy Toolkit, Part 1

This lecture begins to lay out a menu of options for action strategies for advancing a social justice agenda, going beyond the ones most commonly seen in the media.

Lecture 5.1: The Social Justice Advocacy Toolkit, Part 2

This lecture adds to the menu of options for action strategies for social justice advocacy, whose exploration began in Lecture 5.

Lecture 6: Alternative and Unorthodox Avenues for Social Justice Advocacy

This lecture takes a look at unexpected, non-traditional and unorthodox avenues for advancing a social justice agenda, beyond those explored in Lectures 5 and 5.1.

Lecture 7: Advocating to Government – Climbing the Bureaucracy Ladder

This is the first of three lectures hat investigate how to advocate to a government or governmental body. It focuses on taking a social justice message to a governmental organization and working one’s way up the bureaucratic ladder.

Lecture 8: Campaigning for New Legislation

As the second in the three lectures on advocating to a governmental body, this lecture looks at specific strategies when advocating to a legislature, Parliament or other legislative body for legislative reforms.

Lecture 9: Making an Effective Presentation to Legislative Hearings

As the third of the three lectures on advocating to a government body, this lecture offers concrete strategies for making a formal presentation to a legislative committee or other form of public hearings.

Lecture 10: Mounting a Social Justice Campaign in the Media, Part 1

This is the first of two lectures offering strategies for bringing a social justice advocacy message to the media.

Lecture 11: Mounting a Social Justice Campaign in the Media, Part 2

As the second of the two lectures on media strategy, this lecture offers more tips for dealing with the mainstream media and looks at using social media in a social justice advocacy effort.

Feel Free to Incorporate These Materials into Courses You Teach – You Don’t Need Advance Permission to Use Them

If you teach in any school, college or university, you are welcome to use any and all of these lectures and readings in your courses. This material is truly open-source.

If you are part of a community organization that wants to train its members or community to do advocacy on social justice issues, you too are welcome to use all or part of these lectures and reading materials.

Let Us Know What You Think of These Lectures and Readings

We are very eager to get your feedback. How did you use these materials? What parts? Were they helpful?

Email us at aodafeedback@gmail.com

A Key Resource for You

An important and helpful resource for this course is the expanding package of episodes of Disability Rights and Wrongs — The David Lepodcast. You can read all about them on the AODA Alliance website’s podcast page. The podcast is available on Apple Music, Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts (except not on YouTube).