Advocacy as Mission Frame.

Frame the decision to advocate against your mission honestly, so your board decides whether representing the people you serve is part of your purpose, rather than reacting to a single issue or avoiding the question out of fear.

First in Decide Whether and How to Advocate, before the legal consultation and the board decision.

Test representation against your mission

For each upstream condition you named in the diagnostic, work the question through.

The upstream condition harming the people we serve

Is leaving this unaddressed consistent with our mission, or does our mission actually obligate us to speak to it?

What would it mean to serve this population while staying silent about the forces that harm them?

The mission question, stated plainly

If serving the people we serve is our purpose, is representing them where their lives are decided part of serving them, or a departure from it?

Name the cost of both roads

What advocating will cost us, in time, risk, and relationships

What staying silent will cost, in mission unfulfilled and people unrepresented

For most organizations that serve a population, working this frame honestly reveals that representation is not an add-on to the mission but an expression of it: the mission followed upstream to where the harm starts. That does not decide the matter, the board does, but it puts the decision on the right ground. Hand this frame to your board as the basis of their decision. Feeds the Board Advocacy Decision Guide.

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