Happy new year! We are pleased to be able to announce that we have received a grant of £9600 to support our work this year.

This will pay for the local advocacy support groups (next meeting 7 February at 4.30pm) as well as for leaflets and information to be printed, newsletters, free training to local voluntary groups, and for the website. Hopefully this will be a springboard for further funding.

The new NAN website is up and nearly ready for the 9th annual National Advocacy Conference next week - check it out at www.advocacynetwork.org.uk.

I will also be going with Ben (our treasurer, but also from Urban Space/Lift Up) to run a multi-media room at the conference. We will share our experiences of creating websites and we have special guests Acting Up and the Isle of Wight Advocacy Trust talking about their experiences of video making.

Advocacy Action has been contracted to create the website for the National Advocacy Network. We have been quietly offering to do web design and management work for advocacy projects for a while now, and we hope this will be one of many projects we do in the future as it fits in well with our wider aims and seems to be a good way of generating some income.

The first of a regular series of networking meetings for local advocates was held in the new Advocacy Action office space. The theme was 'working more effectively with health and social care professionals' and a few actions were agreed including developing leaflets and training for service staff who work with advocates. Thanks to all those who attended and made it a productive meeting.

The next meeting will be on Wednesday 4 July, and will pick up on the actions that were agreed.

We have added Begin and the new Kirklees and Wakefield IMCA Service to our ‘Find an Advocate’ pages. We look forward to working more with both these organisations in the future.

It's that time of year again. The AGM will be at our new office on Tuesday 8 May at 5pm. Everyone is welcome. The Annual Report is also now online.

We're moving, but not far. We're going to be collaborating more closely with the people and projects supported by Urban Space. We have been working closely together since the start of Advocacy Action, and it seems to be the right time to cement the relationship further. This will mark a revitalisation of Advocacy Action's work and we are certainly going to be more active in the coming months, independently supporting independent advocacy across Wakefield.

AdvocacyWiki is based on the same idea as the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia. 'Wiki' means 'quick', and AdvocacyWiki aims to be a practical and quick resource for advocates. The information here will grow gradually over the next year, but we are very enthusiastic about its possibilities so do go and have a look.

The annual NAN conference will be held in Brighton this year, and Advocacy Action will be running a workshop on 'Advocacy for Refugees' as well as helping out with the speed networking and other parts of the organisation.

RASA's AGM was held on Friday at the Agbrigg & Belle Vue Community Centre in Wakefield. About 50 people attended from most of the refugee and asylum seeker communities across Wakefield District. It was great to be in such a diverse and positive place, and again to catch up with lots of people. The local Council Asylum Seekers Team, the Community Cohesion Team, the Wakefield District Partnership, and the CAB were also represented.

An award was made to Chris Pell who has been volunteering at RASA almost every day for the last 7 months and has made a huge contribution to the project, although unfortunately he was unable to attend the meeting.

Two new Committee members were elected. Elsa, representing the African communities, has been volunteering at RASA for several months already and will be an important asset to the committee. Also Henry was formally nominated onto the committee and accepted. Henry was involved with RASA from the beginning, although for the last two years his role has been to give occasional independent advice. Masoud now hopes that Henry will be able to contribute even more to the strengthening of RASA's advocacy work.

The blog has already made quite an impact. I invited suggestions for things to write about, and one of these has led to lots of Police interest. Ironically after a long time of quietly getting on with training and policy development issues, two close friends of mine were also involved with the Police this week in quite unfortunate ways. In many ways I am happy to be able to write about these issues, and I hope this can help make a difference, but it has underlined the fact that the blog is produced in my own time and is fully independent of Advocacy Action.

These posts are relevant to advocacy's goals of helping people to make their voices heard, but I don't want them to distract from the more important work of discussing more practical advocacy issues. So have a look at the posts about:

• What is independent advocacy
• 'Can you have my body? What about my mind?' about Habeas Corpus and mental health
• Incorporeal transformations about some subtle communication issues
• Reading and self-development
• The advantage of ignorance - a useful tool for advocates
• What's this blog about?

I've started to write a blog. This is like a diary, and is made up of lots of entries, sorted by date. I will be using the space to reflect about what's going on in Advocacy Action, in Wakefield, and further afield. The entries will often be written late at night and published without consultation, so it will be quite unofficial. I hope at the same time it will give some good opportunities for some more creative and even entertaining thinking.

The blog is currently offsite, at http://advocacyblog.blogspot.com/.

Our AGM was held on Wednesday at our office. It was good to catch up with some old friends again, and everyone enjoyed the food and the fair trade chocolate...

Download the Annual Report and the notes of the meeting from our project documents page here.

We have just been awarded a contract to provide some pilot training days and develop some practical guidance for Connexions PAs. This training will help the PAs to be more aware of advocacy based approaches to supporting people, and will enable them to use these approaches with some people who are finding it particularly difficult to access education, employment or training.

For some time now we have been attending the meetings of the Involving Children and Young People Subgroup and supporting their work on developing a District-wide Code of Practice for dealing with complaints. A key part of this code of practice is the support for advocacy for any child or young person making a complaint. Advocacy Action will also be helping the group to ensure that enough trained advocates are available to meet this increased demand.

After a lot of work, our website has now been properly launched - and you're looking at it! We have got quite excited during the development process and we hope this site will give us opportunities to do all sorts of creative things. Look out for more articles about advocacy, more resources, and hopefully more people's voices from different advocacy groups around Wakefield.

This will be held on Friday 17 March, 10am–12noon, at the Children's Advocacy Service office in Castleford.

At the Management Committee meeting today it was decided that we should take a more flexible approach to developing and maintaining Advocacy Action's work - or else see it disappear. In particular it should be possible for Advocacy Action to do some advocacy work, as long as it wasn't interfering with any other local project. This might enable it to bring in some modest income, and it could be a good opportunity to gradually develop a Community Advocate Scheme as we have discussed before.

At the same time there could be opportunities for doing short pieces of work that will help us to develop our portfolio and show that we are reliable and produce high quality outputs. This is also in line with our wish to develop more directly as a social enterprise. Again - watch this space.

Unfortunately the last two applications for funding have failed, so we don't have enough money to continue to employ Henry as the Project Coordinator. Henry has committed himself to continue to try to work for Advocacy Action and for advocacy in Wakefield more generally for as long as he can, so watch this space.

We are now registered as an Industrial and Provident Society for the benefit of the community. This means we can enter into contracts, raise funds more effectively, and will be directly governed by our committee. For more information see our Legal Status page.