DIY Advocate Tool

At Advocacy Centre North, we were looking for innovative ways to work with people around self-advocacy and support our advocates to plan for empowerment and independence.

We wanted to ensure that we were proactive in meeting the Advocacy Charter and QPM standards – Person Led and Empowerment – supporting opportunities for self-advocacy empowerment and enablement and exercising choice and control about their decisions. Based on our experience of delivering high quality advocacy support, we worked with app developers and a mental health user group to create a new app for phones and web. The DIY Advocate app launched in Autumn 2017 and is designed to be an advocate-in-your-pocket, a self-advocacy tool to support people needing to engage with services, make choices, resolve issues and make sure their voice is heard in decisions that relate to them.

DIY Advocate

• Complements the work we do encouraging self-reliance and the development of self-advocacy skills, it doesn’t replace the valuable resource of face to face advocacy but supports the use of advocacy time when needed.
• Offers a way of capturing decisions people need to make, creates action reports as a way to keep track.
• Can be sent to an advocate or directly to a worker involved in preparation for a meeting.
• Can store key contact details
• Provides easy access to a range of relevant resources to support them on the way.

We’re really pleased with the end result and have had extremely positive feedback! Alongside access to the app, we offer packages of training and also willing to develop versions for larger organisations who might want a personalised version for themselves and the people they help.

Follow our story or find out more: contact us on DIYadvocate@cvsnewcastle.org.uk or follow us @DIYAdvocateUK on facebook and twitter.