AMAA with Moderator Asche on Youth and Health Advocacy!

Woww @Asche , you have done so much, go you! I've loved reading through the responses, can't wait to see where the conversation goes next!

Hi ReachOut Community! Just a reminder that @Asche will be joining us to answer your questions from around 3pm today!

Pop on by if you are online!

Just going to tag members who have liked the posts in this thread and a few others who might be interested! @mrmusic @N1ghtW1ng @MisoBear @Tay100 @ayrc_1904 @QueenBee @Tiny_leaf @JazzInMay 

Alright awesome! Happy Monday everyone (or well. Sad Monday, depending on how you feel about the work week. If weeks even exist anymore in this social distancing era. What even is time, you guys ). Thanks for sending in your questions over the weekend! Some of them are pretty beefy (as in, people have written multiple books on them), so I may not be able to respond to all of them, but I'll start by picking out a few that I think most people would be interested in, and then try to smash out as many as I can over the next two hours/maybe come back to finish off the others if I can squeeze in some time during the rest of the week.

Just before we begin though, so everyone is on the same page, I'll refer you all to Bre-RO's definition of what advocacy is, because it's a super broad term and it helps for everyone to have a clear idea of what it means going in. Tl;dr, it's when an individual or organization speaks up or acts on the behalf of another individual or group, to achieve a positive outcome for their client. For example, a doctor might advocate for their patient to be bumped up on an organ transplant list, or a social worker might speak to a judge to relax their client's parole requirements or alleviate the harshness of their sentence. I generally split advocacy according to individual, community or systems/political levels (which can itself be statewide, national or global), as the nature of the advocacy that occurs changes a lot based on who the client is, and who the audience for it is. For instance, the way you would talk to a judge for one person, is going to be very different to giving a mental health awareness presentation to a high school, which is itself going to be very different to talking to politicians, scientists, inventors or companies about what they can do to improve mental health. As such, each type of advocacy requires its own kind of skillset, and people who are interested in one type of advocacy might not necessarily be interested in another type (e.g. if you hate giving speeches, then awareness presentations probably aren't going to be your thing, but you can totally still sit in and contribute lived experience perspectives to scientists and policymakers).

Since I've mostly done community and systems advocacy, I'll mostly be speaking to those types, but really all levels of advocacy are incredibly important. The main difference is in just how you get your impact across - at the individual level, you can change someone's entire life by just being there for them, whereas at the community and systems level, your impact as a single advocate probably isn't going to rock anyone's world (I've lost count of the number of high school students I've probably bored to sleep giving my presentations hahaha), but you can get your message out to way more people, and with time and a LOT of help, hopefully change whole cultures and systems. Because even if the students I spoke to might not remember anything I said, they WILL at least remember that I was there, and hopefully that makes them feel a little more comfortable even just thinking about their and their peers' mental health.

(See what I mean about the long posts? )

Alright, to actually get to the questions, I'll bundle these three together for this post:

1. How did you first get involved in advocacy?
2. What skills did you need to learn to become and advocate? And how did you learn those skills?
3. How did you find opportunities to represent young people? How can I also find opportunities that interest me?

1. Much like any kind of work or career, step 1 of getting involved in advocacy is just "being there", and being involved in the right networks (which is easier said than done, but I'll get to that). For me personally, my systems-advocacy began when I joined Beyondblue's bluevoices program way back in 2014, which is essentially Beyondblue's lived and carer-experience membership program that tries to get lived and carer perspectives on their activities, as well as those of their partnered organizations (e.g. SANE, ReachOut, Butterfly Foundation, etc.). As part of bluevoices, Beyondblue sends out a whole bunch of opportunities to get involved on a roughly monthly basis, and within about two months of joining, I saw an opportunity advertised to join a lived experience advisory group for a youth mental health advocacy and research organization, and it all kind of kicked off from there. I was very luck in that the organization I joined was actually VERY open to youth-led perspectives and gave us a lot of leeway to take leadership and form our own message, even when we were talking to companies and policymakers about systems-change. Sadly it doesn't exist anymore (we ran out of government funding/couldn't get it renewed), but through them I was able to build my network and connections to secure further opportunities elsewhere, like the Partnership of Maternal and Newborn Child Health, which itself later connected me to the World Health Organization. Provided you can demonstrate you know what you're doing and can be trusted to do the work, it can get pretty crazy fairly rapidly, but I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

When my honours thesis forced me to be a little more grounded in 2016, I linked up with the Black Dog Institute and have done most of my community level advocacy through them since! They've actually been really great in this regard as well - since I'd been volunteering with them for several years at that point, they actually sponsored me to take a dedicated mental health skills training course in 2018 and actually paid me to do those specialized presentations afterwards (despite the course itself costing like $5000 already). I still wouldn't recommend going into community/systems advocacy for the pay (it can be a really long road to get there), but if you're already involved in the sector, it's worth considering as something to do on top of uni/other part-time work.

2. As mentioned, it really depends on what level of advocacy you're doing. For community/systems level, the general soft skills of being a good communicator (verbal, written, just coming across as a genuine and passionate person etc.) is going to be really helpful wherever you go, and being a confident public speaker in particular can be really helpful. You can get around that last one based on how selective you are in your opportunities, though this necessarily limits your options.

That said, the single most important "skill", isn't really a skill at all - you have to be really passionate about whatever you're advocating on, and actively eager and curious to learn more about the area. Especially when you are doing community and systems advocacy, you have to be mindful that you aren't just speaking on the behalf of yourself, but also of everyone you've been selected to help represent, which means you need to constantly be listening to those around you to ensure you're reliably transmitting their message across. For systems-level advocacy in particular you also need to be really keen to learn more about how systems refer to and influence the issues you are talking to in order to meaningfully contribute to the discussions behind had. That means reading statistics, reports, being aware of at least the talking points of big publications like the Royal Commission into Victoria's Mental Health - otherwise you're going to find that everything being mentioned is going to fly straight over your head and there won't be any real opportunity to you to jump in and be heard.

As to how to develop these skills - it sounds ridiculously simple, but honestly, just talk to other people who are interested in the area you want to advocate on. Not only will this give you a better understanding of the major issues, it'll give you a temperature reading of what people's general thoughts are on the topic (e.g. how important do people think climate change is, really?), it'll also give you a lot of practice communicating these ideas back to people across a range of understanding, and just generally make you more comfortable communicating. Don't forget to do your own research, though! Having your own opinions and coming to your own conclusions independently is just as important as being able to listen to others, especially when you need to think on your feet because a policymaker or interviewer has thrown a super-specific question at you (which doesn't happen that often, but it does happen).

3. If you don't have a super-specific topic you want to dive into (e.g. youth mental health and the role of tech), then Google is probably your best friend on this one. Google "Young Opportunities Australia", and there should be a number of organizations that will provide similar newsletters of opportunities as Beyondblue did for me. I still check out what's on offer at youngopps.com every now and then!

Hi @Asche! Thank you for sharing your insights. I'd like to get more involved in youth advocacy too.
I think it's great that your volunteering has been flexible. I've volunteered at a lot of places and it took me a long time to find places which took into account that people have other commitments.
I agree with @ecla34. You've definitely made a big impact in this field! 🙂

Well, that was a monstrosity. Moving on to the next set of q's...(Probably stick with just one this time for the sake of readability?)

4. How do you know when your advocacy is working? What changes have you seen due to young people using their voice?

Bundling those two questions because this is my AMAA and I make the rules, muahahaha

But also because they're related, and are both individually super hard (but very important) questions. With community advocacy, you can often get some sense of immediate accomplishment based on the facial expressions of the audience members/if some people stick around behind to ask you questions, or say thanks (which does mean a lot, considering the times I've talked to Year 8's or 9's who've been taken out of class to listen to me in a giant assembly and want nothing more than to just be let out of lunch). As to how long that sticks around for...well, it's hard to say. No school's ever fixed bullying by just getting students to listen to a 1 hour chat. But if you stick with it over time (and I mean, years) and keep your ears open, you can tell that cultures have started changing in a lot of places. With community and systems-level advocacy, you have to remember that you're always playing the long-game; chipping away at something every day in the hope that one day you'll be able to break through. And to a large extent, that hope is borne out by reality - many of the community audiences I speak to these days ARE at least aware of depression and anxiety, and some of the teenagers I speak to are quite happy to say that they've been through that, or witnessed it in a friend (not all, but some). We're still not where we should be, but there's no denying that we've come a long way since even 5, and certainly 10 years ago. I mean, we have a mental health month now. I could have never imagined anything like that when I was in high school, nevermind earlier.

With systems-advocacy...it's hard. While you can still get a sense of change based on improvement across years, there's a lot less immediate reward of having gone "yes, I've done something good here". Part of the problem is that the majority of the problems worth advocating on have no clear answers regarding what is the best path ahead. While a lot of institutions are quite happy to track whether they did something (e.g. X government invested Y millions of dollars in mental health), they can be really hesitant about releasing information about whether what they did was successful (e.g. okay you invested Y millions in mental health, but did you actually treat anyone? Are people healthier now? How are you measuring that?). This naturally, makes it really hard to tell whether what you're advocating for is really working, which is why 9/10 times when you advocate for a specific policy, you also need to advocate for appropriate metrics for that policy.

You kind of have to make your peace that some of the stuff that's tried simply might not work, whether that's due to under-resourcing or simply because the plan is fundamentally flawed. And then you try, try again using the best available evidence possible, in the hope that something eventually does, and that you have to keep trying, because to not do so would be cruelty and neglect. It's a lot like science, in that regard. You never know for certain whether something is going to work, but that doesn't mean it's not worth giving it a shot regardless.

That's a really good point @Asche !
It's important to ask those sorts of questions going into things like community programs etc. Definitely hard to know if your advocacy is working if you don't know how you're measuring impact! Bit tricky to improve too 😛 

For some youth mental health volunteering I'm part of, we've been trying to have those discussions about how and why what we're doing might be able to improve outcomes for young people, and it can be super challenging to nail down! That's for sure!

You definitely weren't kidding about the long ones @Asche! 😛 
It sounds like such a whirlwind journey! 

I really like your take on the skills advocates need, especially:

That said, the single most important "skill", isn't really a skill at all - you have to be really passionate about whatever you're advocating on, and actively eager and curious to learn more about the area.

Having an open mind and being willing to learning both seem really important in advocacy! I also really agreed with what you said about keeping in mind the needs/opinions of those you're advocating for/with 😄 

I'm loving reading through these answers @Asche ! 

To me, it really highlights how many opportunities can come your way if you're brave, and put yourself out there for these kind of positions. Your work with the Black Dog Institute sounds fantastic and really rewarding, I really admire the work that they do. 

That's really cool! It sounds like you work really hard, and do so much ahah. This might be a question coming up but how do you navigate advocacy and study? 

I agree with you, being passionate is absolutely the number one skill you can have. Skills such as engaging an audience/ public speaking can be learnt along the way, but as someone has once told me before, if you're passionate about what you're talking about that comes across to the audience more than any signs of nerves you may have. Even if no one listens, your passion with come through.

For the third question, it's also good to ask around! For example, you could start by sending an email to your local youth mental health center, or ask where others have gotten their opportunities.

Thanks for the question @Hozzles! In the interests of smashing out as many questions as possible, I'll bundle your question with these ones:

5. How do you navigate advocacy and study? 

6. How important do you think lived experience and sharing one's story is in the process of change?

5. With great difficulty, hahahaha. There's really no blanket best answer to this, especially since I'm still very much learning (and will continue to need to learn how to balance these things as circumstances change, see: COVID). I find it fairly easy to switch off of community advocacy (if I'm not on a stage I can just "be myself"), especially with Black Dog Institute, because I know they have enough volunteers that they'll be able to cover their presentations 99/100 times even if I can't. It's harder to do that with systems advocacy when so much of it is done online via emails, word docs and teleconferences. Part of it is knowing that it's okay to switch off - it's not going to be the end of the world if you can't feedback on that policy document or miss that teleconference. Systems advocacy can actually be a surprisingly small world so provided you've been around for a while, people will remember that you actually exist and be reasonably welcoming with opportunities to bring you back even if you need to tap out for a while to focus on studies/work/exams/life (not that you should be complacent and not look for opportunities on your own). Also just generally communicating to people what your boundaries are, when you're busy and may not be available etc. Especially as a youth advocate, people often understand (at least cognitively) that you're still studying/have your own life to get to and don't do this professionally 9-5pm.

6. Lived experience is incredibly important. Part of it is just that, unless if you've personally been through something, it's impossible to fully understand it, or how to manage it. Stats can tell us what is, but without lived experience, we can't know what's actually important among all the data that's been collected. It's certainly not the end-all-be-all of advocacy or policy-making, and other factors do need to be considered (e.g. science, logistics, etc.), but in general I would be extremely skeptical towards any healthcare policy that didn't involve meaningful discussions with lived experience advocates at some stage.

Also it sounds a little emotionally manipulative to say, but lived experience is also just really helpful for getting people on board with ideas, by putting a face on issues. A great deal of advocacy is just getting people on board with ideas, and at the end of the day, most people are more strongly motivated to help real people that they've seen and heard speak, shook hands and held a conversation with, then anonymous figures lost amidst an ocean of stats.

Piggybacking on the end of that last post:

7. Has there been a time where sharing your voice has been challenging or triggering? How did you overcome it?

Absolutely. You can try and minimize it by being super clear and honest with yourself what you actually are comfortable with sharing and what you're not - e.g. when you give a presentation on what depression symptoms are like, are you comfortable with telling your audience that these are things that have affected you personally? Or do you just want to go "here are some of the common symptoms that some people get"? (Note that those boundaries may change, depending on who you're talking to or how you're feeling.) Oftentimes you'll also desensitize with time and repetition, so the borders of "what's comfortable" will often expand and expand as you get more used to it and develop more confidence in delivering your story. 

But even then, I've still surprised myself by being a bit more tender or raw on a subject than originally anticipated from time to time. It doesn't happen often, but it's definitely a risk when you're first starting and you're less certain about where your boundaries actually are.

In terms of "overcoming" it - I think it really depends on the situation, how severely it's affecting you and what your goals are for the piece of advocacy you're delivering. If you're delivering a presentation on your own, it's not great to have a panic attack in the middle of a speech and be completely unable to speak for 20 minutes until you recovered. But if you're in the middle of a policy consultation, and need to duck out - hell, people might not even notice and just think you're taking a phone call.

With that mind in though, I want it to be clear that there's really nothing empirically wrong with vulnerable. In fact, as a mental health advocate, that's probably one of my core messages in 3/4s of the community presentations that I do. And if I want people to believe in what I'm saying, I need to believe in that too, even if I don't always manage to execute on it. But if I find myself choking up on stage because something has struck a deeper cord in me than intended, and need to take a breath for a minute, that's okay. There's no stronger form of leadership than demonstrating the change you wish to see, and if you show people that you're okay with being exposed and vulnerable, they'll often reciprocate and respect that trust you've placed in them. Allowing yourself to be vulnerable, is itself, it's own kind of advocacy.

Aaannnd final question of the evening:

8. What are a few practical ways we can empower young people to get involved in policy making and advocacy?

This is a slightly tricky question, because so much of that initial decision is really about confidence. It's really hard when you're just getting into advocacy as a young person (or even before getting into it), because it's really easy to fall into the trap of thinking "I'm just a kid, what could I possibly have to do add to the discussion?". So part of empowerment is really about validating youth perspectives, to say "you might not have a PhD or 30 years of experience working in this area, but what you have to say and what you feel is real and important too", to the extent that youth perspectives in the room are just as necessary as everyone else's. (Which isn't to say that we should just accept everything that comes out of a young person's mouth, just that we should give it equal consideration to everybody else's.)

Other things that can be done is to simply provide youth with access to opportunities to be involved. Organizations don't need to do this personally, but even linking young people to opportunities elsewhere that might interest them can be helpful for prospective youth advocates to get their foot in the door.

The last bit of practical advice, is to actually give young people training on the institutions and issues they will be speaking to. It's very hard to be an effective advocate when you don't know your stuff, and unfortunately a lot of policy can be super opaque and hard to get into unless if you're a giant mega uber-nerd. Creating, or simply directing people to knowledge summaries of key statistics and practices (e.g. what is the NDIS?) in lay or youth-friendly terms can be really helpful for advocates just getting started. Beyond that, introducing young people to how the institutions they want to work with actually operate is also likely to be helpful. E.g. Who is actually responsible for addressing youth mental health in Australia? Who do they need to be talking to? How can they get access to these people?

As an extra tip on how you can empower yourself when you lack confidence: A personal tricky I use that gets me through whenever I'm hesitating to say something for fear of being triggered (or just sounding dumb) is reminding myself that I'm not just speaking for myself, but for all the ones like me, who didn't get the opportunity I did, and that I need to do it for them, if not myself. No idea if that'll help anyone else, but it works for me! 

Thanks so much for joining in tonight everyone! Great hearing from you all again . Stay safe out there!

thanks so much for sharing your insights and experiences @Asche !! you do incredible work and it's really powerful what you have done and continue to do!

@Asche oh man that would be dodgy 😞  Bit of a big call to say a policy adresses the needs of individuals or a community without actually asking the people it affects!

Hi @Asche! And no, time doesn't exist anymore. 

'Because even if the students I spoke to might not remember anything I said, they WILL at least remember that I was there, and hopefully that makes them feel a little more comfortable even just thinking about their and their peers' mental health.'

This is an awesome, positive way of thinking about it! Often when I'm volunteering I've had thoughts like '...well, if we're not using any of my ideas, and I'm not leading events or having my voice heard, what even is the point of me being there'. But there is power in numbers! And also, you may symbolically represent a certain subcommunity that someone else could relate to, and seeing you being in a mental health space can be very impactful.

@Asche it's really interesting seeing advocacy broken down into different levels like that! it reminds me that because advocacy is so broad, there's lots of ways and areas for positive change to happen 🙂 

Heya! I'm so excited for this! I don't know how much I'll be able to catch (this part of your intro rings true for me: 'depending on how much work I get done over the weekend/studying I've managed to catch upon' ) but if I miss any I'll be sure to pop in later! 

looking forward to hearing your responses @Asche 😄