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| ADVOCATE! Effect Change in Our World / Tom Hyland |
| Speak up, get informed, organise, actively promote, represent, and make a difference. it sounds pretty simply doesn't it. But the enormity of mounting a campaign overwhelms many people who really do want change. This is the unseen mountain that stops most of us in our tracks. However, Tom Hyland, the director of the East Timor Ireland Solidarity Campaign, has been over that mountain and kindly offered to come back and show an interested group of potential campaigners on Peace Boat paths which can be taken to mount an advocacy campaign.
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"Advocacy is like coming up against a brick wall. The question you have to ask yourself, once you have decided that you will not turn back, is do I go under or over? Do I drill many tiny holes to weaken the structure or do I smash it down? Or do I build a ladder?" said Tom.
It was these options which Tom's series, on planning an advocacy campaign, wished to detail. Tom outlined his blueprint for action under three headings, Organising, Research and Action. Although not to be taken as an exhaustive list of options, the workshops served more as a series of guidelines to be used by the possible future campaigners.
Many of the participants of the advocacy training sessions were Japanese passengers on Peace Boat who said that these kinds of workshops in Japan are very rare and that the NGO sector in Japan is very weak. This in turn means that advocacy campaigns in Japan are few and far between, their effect limited. This is why spaces like Peace Boat are so important, spaces where people can be removed from their seemingly stagnant environment and be re-enthused.
This was no less true for the participants from other nations. Kreshnik Berisha, an international scholarship student from Kosova, said that he had been "re-energised". Keren Assaf, a peace activist from Israel also expressed new hope about being able to return to Israel with fresh tools to "right injustices in Israel and Palestine". |
| Duncan Trevan |
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| This week at
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PEACE BOAT is an NGO in Special Consultative Status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. |
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