Teaching Public Health Advocacy

The purpose of this presentation is to promote discussion among attendees about the importance of public health advocacy courses in schools of public health. Such courses help students achieve competency in community level interventions. The presenter will draw upon her four years of teaching the first community organizing and advocacy course in the School of Public Health and Health Services of The George Washington University. The course teaches graduate students how to articulate models of community organizing and social action and to understand the history of community health problems. Student teams design and conduct community level interventions in which they work in the community on advocacy interventions to ameliorate selected health problems. Teams design and brand their advocacy campaigns, develop advocacy action plans that include coalition building, media advocacy, and negotiation strategies that will achieve policy changes that improve citizens' health. Students learn strategies for targeting corporate practices as well as local governments' policies and laws. They create and manage multiple media channels for outreach and education and conduct a variety of community events that involve local residents. Team projects offer professors many opportunities to discuss ethics, approaches to allies and opponents, best practices for social change, and how to continue community campaigns after a course is over. The presenter will use case examples of techniques that work, evaluation approaches, and lessons learned from successes and failures. Advocacy courses require flexibility in content, work outside the classroom and are enormously rewarding for faculty and students.