The leaflet 'What is Independent Advocacy?' was one of the first things Advocacy Action published, before we were even called Advocacy Action. It has had several small revisions, and seems to have settled on something we are all happy with. There are also accompanying 'handout style' (one side of A4) information sheets about the different models of advocacy (including citizen advocacy, self advocacy, etc.) and thinking about other forms of support from an advocacy perspective.

Finally there is another handout, still in progress, about how to make a good referral to an advocate. This is the first of several resources that we hope to be able to make available for people who work for local health and care organisations, including the Council.

These documents are also available on our page About Advocacy – in fact this page is a web based version of the first leaflet.

These are our policies. The User Involvement Policy was initially written to support Cloverleaf Advocacy's developing user involvement policy, and was later adopted by them (with a few amendments). Cloverleaf went on to adapt our Adult Protection Policy for their use. We have found that there is an easy sharing of policies between advocacy organisations, and we would like to encorage this to continue. We will be adding further policies here as we write them. Please see our Terms of Use for more information about this.

Equal Opportunities Policy pdf

Adult Protection Policy pdf

Complaints Policy pdf

How to complain pdf

Confidentiality Policy - uploaded 20 December 06 pdf

User Involvement Policy pdf

These are articles our Coordinator, Henry, has had published. The first article about non-representational advocacy was published in Planet Advocacy magazine in March 2005 (with the jokes edited out...). The other two articles were published in Wakefield's own adult protection newsletter 'Protection in Practice'

We will add some case studies soon, in the meantime there are examples on our links page here.

One of the key interests Wakefield MDC had when they started commissioned the research that led to this project was in standards for advocacy. This is a difficult area mainly because there have been so many different attempts around the UK over many years, and none of them have resulted in any wide agreement.

This is now changing and we do have National Standards for the provision of advocacy to children in care, and there is work going on to develop standards for the new IMCAs amongst other things. There is also an excellent set of standards which has recently been updated in Leeds (see the Advocacy Network Leeds website), and Action for Advocacy is also doing interesting work with their Advocacy Charter and the developing Charter in Action project.

We did do some good work in Wakefield though, and it does seem useful to have a set of locally agreed standards - standards that we have all engaged in and thought about and agreed to, and which are written in a way that make sense to our local circumstances. The main work on the standards paused in September 2004 due to other more pressing commitments, but the draft is available here for information and we would like to pick up on it again and finish it.

More recently we have been working on a Code of Practice for advocates. This is a much simpler document and we believe we can complete it and gain wide agreement across the District to work with it. This will also open up further opportunities for increasing understanding of advocacy methods and working more effectively with referral agencies.

Draft Standards pdf

Draft Code of Practice pdf

We aim to build an open resource that people can use. We believe that these sorts of documents should be openly available to anyone, and we understand they often need to be adapted to suit different needs. We are happy for these documents to be copied, amended, used and redistributed, although we do ask you to try to acknowledge Advocacy Action as a source, and we insist that you allow others to use the work equally openly. For more information see our Terms of Use .