Aims of this guide
Advocacy services have many pressures on their time
and resources. Advocacy Network - Leeds was keen that
this guide should be something that adds to advocacy services.
Rather than being a document to sign up to
(and possibly file/forget) it should be an active and useful tool.

The guide aims to enable advocacy services to ensure that:
- They stay true to the ideals of advocacy as set out in this guide.
- People coming to the services know what to expect and how
  that service will treat them
- Services runs safely
- There is a way of demonstrating the work that services do
- Advocacy services have a choice of different ways in which
  they should be measured
- Policies and procedures are in place to enable the above
- People providing other services know how advocacy
  services operate

So this guide fits into a wider context that can be seen
as a four-part process:
1. A statement of what you can expect from an advocacy service
2. A set of expectations for people with different roles in advocacy.
3. A choice of ways in which a service might demonstrate its work.
4. A set of checklists to help services look at how they operate.

Organisation of the guide
This guide is arranged by theme rather than by who has
responsibility for what action. This change was made
to make it more easily to show how advocacy services
ensure quality in areas such as confidentiality, independence
and safety. It should make it easier for people using the
guide to see how their concern is being addressed.

Who is this guide for?
A guide for people who come to advocacy services
A key issue in advocacy is giving clear information to people
about their rights and what they can expect.
Members of Advonet were keen to produce
a set of standards that gave that information to people who
come to their services. This is one of the reasons for the
shift towards organisation by theme.
Advocacy Across London (now Action for Advocacy)
produced an accessible version of their
Advocacy Charter poster in 2003. 
Advonet agreed that a similar poster for
services in Leeds would be useful. This led to the
development of 'What to expect of advocacy services' poster.
This guide may be seen as the expanded form of that poster.
We believe that the best way to ensure that a service
stays true to its aims and ideals is to tell the
client/partner what they should expect.

A guide For advocacy services
This guide shows the ways in which we believe advocacy
services should operate. There are statements of expectation
which we believe all advocacy services in Leeds
should live up to.
There are also a large number of possible ways of
demonstrating the work of advocacy. The number of
 measures is not meant to be onerous or intimidating.
The aim is to be flexible, giving a range of ways
in which advocacy services can choose to be measured.
Each advocacy service is a work in progress. 
Advonet believes that by collaborating
and pooling experience it is possible for us to raise
the standard of advocacy services in Leeds.

These standards attempt to enable advocacy services
to show how far they have come and to give a framework
to help services develop their own practice in relation to
key principles of advocacy.

There is also a set of checklists relating to different aspects
of advocacy services such as initial information, training,
recording information etc.

A guide for providers of other services
Advocacy is still not fully understood. Sometimes
misunderstandings about an advocate's role can lead
to difficulties. At other times lack of knowledge about
the quality of advocacy services makes people reluctant
to suggest advocacy to their clients/partners.
This guide aims to address these issues.

A guide for funders
Funders need to know how well advocacy services operate
and how effective they are. The measures in this guide
can help funders and advocacy services decide the best
way to judge the quality of different services.

Measuring quality in advocacy
Since the last guide was produced there has been a
movement towards quality marks and measurement tools.
Funders are increasingly asking advocacy services to
demonstrate that they are working effectively and safely.

However, there is concern that something unique about
advocacy might be lost if advocacy services are measured
by standards designed for other services. This guide
has a set of measures which were designed specifically
for advocacy.

The measurement tools which go with this guide may
become a stepping stone to other quality marks for
some groups, but this is not the primary consideration.
Advonet has neither the ability nor
the desire to impose policies and procedures on
member organisations.
However it does encourage each member organisation
to choose a set of standards against which it believes
it should be judged and to measure the organisation's
performance against these.
Advocacy Network - Leeds will be happy to list this
information on its website.

What is advocacy?
Advocacy is a way of helping make sure that a person's
voice is heard when decisions are made. It involves
looking at choices, enabling people to know their
rights, helping to defend those rights and getting the
person's voice heard.
Advocacy can be useful whenever someone feels that
their rights are not being respected, when an organisation
is not listening to them, or that they find it difficult to make
themselves heard.Advocacy is for people who feel they
are not being heard, who feel they are not being taken
seriously and who fear their rights might not be respected.
This includes people with learning disabilities, elderly people,
people from minority ethnic communities, people with sensory
impairments, people in mental distress, people who have
been abused, homeless people, children, people with physical
disabilities, people with HIV/Aids.

Some ideals and principles of advocacy
Advocacy services need to be confidential, independent,
empowering, supportive of advocates, clear about
what they do, led by the client/partner
(ie they need to put people first) and accessible.
It is also vital that they can demonstrate
safety, accountability, equality of opportunity,
and an effective complaints process.
Independence is vital. The first duty of an advocate
is to the person they are working with. Being able to
demonstrate independence increases the likelihood that
a person will come to an advocacy service. They should
know that an advocate aims to understand, respond to
and represent that person's interests with the same
commitment as if they were their own

Independent advocacy…
- Makes sure the interests of a person or group are
  heard directly or are represented by an advocate.
- Enables people to access their full entitlements to
  rights and services.
- Aims to help people to identify their interests and wishes,
  and to represent these with determination and persistence.
- Encourages self-advocacy as much as possible.

An advocate is not there to represent their own views.
They must represent their client's/partner's views as if
they were their own. When they speak they are amplifying
that person's views. Advocates cannot try to persuade
someone towards a particular point of view. If they did,
whose voice would be being heard?

The Standards
What follows is a set of expectations about advocacy services,
coupled with a set of ways from which different services can
choose how they wish to be measured. It is organised by
the themes based on the 'What to expect from advocacy
services' poster.Advocacy groups will also receive a set
of checklists which can look at different aspects of the
service. It is hoped that this will both help existing
services to improve the way they work and give new groups
a useful framework to use in development.Neither the
expectations nor the measures are definitive.They are
ongoing, evolving and will need to be reviewed periodically.

A Note on Terminology
There is an ongoing debate about whether to refer to people
who come to advocacy services in terms of clients or
partners. This guide uses 'client/partner'. This does nothing
to resolve the issue and is not particularly elegant.
However it is more acceptable than the terms user,
service-user, customer and consumer.
Ideally we would always simply use the
term 'person' or 'people'. However the need for clarity
has led to the use of 'client/partner'.