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Advocacy Snapshot.

Lay out the forces upstream of your daily work, the decisions and rules and budget lines that shape the lives of the people you serve, and ask honestly who, if anyone, speaks for them where those forces are set.

First in the diagnostic, before you try to place your readiness or make any plan.

Trace the wounds upstream

List the recurring problems you treat one case at a time, and for each, name the upstream decision, rule, budget line, or policy that keeps causing it. Not every problem has a policy cause, and that is fine; name the ones that do.

Recurring problem we treatThe upstream decision or condition behind itWho decides it

Ask who is in the room

For each upstream decision above, write who currently speaks to it on behalf of the people you serve.

The decisionWho speaks for the people we serve there todayHonest read: someone effective, someone with no stake, or no one

The one question underneath it all

The silences are the finding. Where you wrote no one, or only people with no stake in the outcome, you have named a place where the people you serve are unrepresented, which is the raw material for everything the pathway does next. This snapshot does not tell you whether to advocate; it tells you honestly where representation is missing. Feeds the Advocacy Diagnostic and the Who Speaks For Them Reality Check.

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