Beyond Victim Identification: A Practitioner's Guide to Designing a Youth Anti-Sex Trafficking Advocacy Program.

Thousands of youth are sexually trafficked each year in the United States. In order to address this concern, anti-trafficking advocates often emphasize the importance of uniform screening protocols to assist with the identification of survivors. Unfortunately, an oft-overlooked component of sex trafficking identification is what to do once a victim has been identified, and how to best meet survivors' complex needs. In this article, the authors provide social work practitioners and other advocates with best practice guidelines for how to design and evaluate anti-sex trafficking advocacy programs for children and youth. These guidelines include considerations related to direct services with clients, community partnerships, and organizational capacity, as well as recommendations for how to begin and then evaluate programming. Regardless of the form selected for the program, all anti-sex trafficking programs should be designed to provide effective, client-centered follow-up and advocacy once a positive identification is made in the community. The recommendations included in this paper are based upon extant literature, the authors' practice experience with survivors, and insights from anti-sex trafficking program evaluations.

Community Power-Building Groups And Public Health NGOs: Reimagining Public Health Advocacy.

Public health frameworks have grappled with the inequitable distribution of power as a driver of the social conditions that determine health. However, these frameworks have not adequately considered building community power as a strategy to shift the distribution of power. Community power-building organizations build and organize a base of affected people to take collective action to transform their material conditions, using advocacy and other tactics. We conducted qualitative interviews with representatives of twenty-two national nongovernmental public health organizations (public health NGOs) and thirteen community power-building organizations to explore the nature and potential of partnerships between public health and community power-building organizations. Our findings suggest ways to close advocacy gaps within the public health ecosystem and ways in which public health can strategically leverage its power, resources, and expertise to support social justice campaigns and movements.

Advocating for Older Adults in the Age of Social Media: Strategies to Achieve Peak Engagement on Twitter.

Background: Over the last decade, many organizations dedicated to serving the needs and interests of older adults have turned to social media platforms, such as Twitter, subsequently rebranded X, to improve the visibility of age-related issues. However, notwithstanding their growing digital presence and participation, minimal attention has been paid to the use of social media among these advocacy groups. To achieve policy change, advocacy organizations must first be able to engage and mobilize audiences. Objective: Our study aims to elucidate how different tweet features affect the time it takes for posts uploaded by age advocacy organizations to reach peak engagement. Methods: We collated 204,905 tweets from 53 age advocacy organizations posted over a 12-year period. The engagement score of each tweet was calculated by combining well-established metrics, namely likes, retweets, quote tweets, and replies. We ran Cox models with tweet features as predictors and time-to-peak engagement as the outcome. "Peak engagement" (event) refers to engagement scores above the 75th percentile, and "time" refers to months taken to reach peak engagement per tweet. Results: Approximately 1 in 2 tweets (n=103,068, 50.3%) had either no hashtags or just 1 hashtag. Around two-thirds (n=131,220, 64%) of the tweets included a URL. Visual information was highly underused, with most tweets not including GIFs (n=204,202, 99.7%), videos (n=199,800, 97.5%), or photos (n=143,844, 70.2%). Roughly half (n=101,470, 49.5%) of the tweets contained mentions and 9.3% (n=19,009) of tweets were replies. Only 4.5% (n=9285) of tweets were quote tweets. Most tweets were uploaded in the afternoon (n=86,004, 42%) and on a weekday (n=180,499, 88.1%). As hypothesized, features associated with peak engagement were the inclusion of visual elements like photos, which increased peak engagement by 3 times (P<.001), and the use of 3 or more hashtags (P<.001). Quote tweets increased engagement by 3 times (P<.001), as compared to regular tweets, controlling for account-level covariates. Tweets from organizations with a higher tweet volume were 40% less likely to reach peak engagement (P<.001). Conclusions: Social media as a networked platform has the potential to reach users on a global scale and at an exponential speed. Having uncovered the features that are more likely to reach peak engagement on Twitter, our study serves as an invaluable resource for age advocacy organizations in their movement to create a more age-inclusive world.

Community health worker perspectives on advocacy: design-based research to develop a digital advocacy training course.

Introduction: While community health workers (CHWs) are well-positioned as health advocates, they frequently lack support and feel undervalued. Advocacy training may prepare CHWs to support communities better. Methods: This study uses a design-based research approach to (1) explore how participation in curriculum-development workshops for a digital advocacy course influenced CHWs' (n = 25) perceptions of advocacy and (2) describe how CHW involvement shaped course development. Data were collected via five discussion groups and seven surveys over six months. Results: Initially, the CHWs perceived themselves as community-advocates but not as self-advocates. They increasingly reflected on the merits of advocating for better working conditions and aspired to greater involvement in decision-making. CHWs reflected positively on their advisory role in shaping the course to improve content acceptability and validity. Discussion: Training efforts to engage CHWs in advocacy must overcome systemic barriers and norms internalized by CHWs that deter them from reaching their full potential as advocates.

The advocacy coalition of sugar-sweetened beverage taxes in Indonesia.

The Ministry of Finance of Indonesia has put sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) taxation on its agenda since 2020 to address the need for health financing, as outlined in the National Medium-Term Development Plan for 2020-2024. However, the adoption process of this fiscal policy has been slow. This study aims to generate insights into the actors involved in the discourse of SSB tax adoption in Indonesia to inform their advocacy and communication efforts using the Advocacy Coalition Framework and Discourse Network Analysis. The analysis was conducted using data extracted from 1733 statements collected from 200 online web domains and subdomains, divided into three timeframes of the policy process. The analysis identified actors supporting and opposing the adoption of SSB tax. The discourse network also identified key advocacy coalitions and organisations in the discussion on SSB tax adoption in Indonesia. The results indicate that there are diverse network patterns in each timeframe and reveal the process and focus of the policy change. The Ministry of Finance had the most significant influence on the discourse, with actors from civil society organisations and universities involved in the process of policy change through evidence-based policy recommendations. Meanwhile, economic actors contributed to the debate on the potential harm of tax adoption to the industry. These findings can inform the policy process and ensure the successful adoption of the SSB tax in Indonesia.

Remember, do no harm?

When the advocacy group America's Frontline Doctors appeared on the steps of the United States Supreme Court in 2020, falsely stating that hydroxychloroquine was a cure for COVID-19, their pronouncement was virally shared by right-wing media and soundly debunked by medical academicians. A year later, one of these frontliners, Joseph Ladapo, became the surgeon general of Florida and a faculty member at the University of Florida College of Medicine. He has continued to spread dangerous misinformation about COVID-19 while his academic colleagues are shamefully silent.

A Theoretically Derived Approach to Impact: Implementing Policy Influence Strategies.

Advocacy is an intentional act of influencing government and an important precondition for successful policy change in society. Drawing from an existing framework on policy influence, we propose an approach to quantifying the impact of policy influence efforts, specifically within the context of European Public Health (EPH) advocacy. The analysis hinges on the article "Moving from tokenism" which provides a starting point to conceptualize strategies to quantify impact. An exploratory case study approach allowed to integrate literature on advocacy evaluation in parallel with the internal documentation of a EPH advocacy organization We provide recommendations to advocacy organizations that aim to create an infrastructure towards quantifying the impact of their efforts. The framework is mostly tailored to the needs of EPH advocacy, but it can also have resonance beyond the scope of a specific sector.

Advocacy organizations and nutrition policy in Nigeria: identifying metrics for enhanced efficacy.

Advocacy organizations have played a significant role in the field of nutrition in recent years. However, why are some advocates viewed as more effective than others? This paper derives metrics for assessing advocacy efficacy by first drawing on key insights from the nutrition and public policy scholarship. A set of metrics is proposed to capture the constitutive elements of three concepts that often emerge as critical from that literature: organizational capacity, strong networks and external outreach. Based on a survey of 66 nutrition stakeholders in Nigeria, including at the federal level and within the states of Kaduna and Kano, the metrics are then applied to a set of advocacy organizations within the country. We show that the metrics can provide insights into why some advocacy organizations are perceived as more effective than others by policymakers. Specifically, we find that geographical reach, the share of budget allocated to advocacy, action plans with clear objectives, large networks that include government and non-governmental policy champions, multiple media and dissemination outputs and numerous training events collectively increase nutrition advocates' visibility to, and influence on, policymakers. Although the metrics are subject to further testing in other country settings and need to be interpreted based on a country's underlying policy system, they offer a useful starting point for more systematic, comparative advocacy analysis and learning within the nutrition field and beyond.

West Oakland's Experience in Building Community Power to Confront Environmental Injustice Through California's Assembly Bill 617.

We explored how air quality management processes associated with Assembly Bill 617 (AB 617) in West Oakland, California, represent a shift in power relationships between government agencies and communities toward the goal of addressing legacies of environmental injustice. We drew from a statewide assessment of community engagement in AB 617's first year, and an analysis of the West Oakland AB 617 process. The first comprised 2 statewide surveys (n = 102 and n = 106), 70 key informant interviews, observation of all AB 617 first-year sites, and analysis of related planning documents. The second comprised 2 rounds of interviews (n = 22 and n = 23, with a total of 19 individuals) and extensive participant observation. Several factors are necessary for pursuing environmental justice: (1) invest in community partnerships and collaborations, (2) honor community knowledge and data, (3) ensure that community constituents share power in environmental governance, and (4) adopt explicit racial justice frameworks. Although still a work in progress, AB 617 offers important lessons for community and policy organizations nationwide engaged in environmental justice. (Am J Public Health. 2022;112(2):262-270. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306592).