Today’s prompt is to provide some advice to an activist who is just starting out. Well, this advice is pretty simple.
Just start.
Stop thinking about it. Stop talking about how you would like to do something. Stop saying, I wish I had a blog. Stop, stop, stop all that crap and just start, start, start.
Tomorrow’s prompt is about a post from the past, well, I wrote a post about how to do something now to start advocating, so I’m not going to re-write that whole post now because it will be getting re-posted tomorrow.
But, for now, just start advocating. Here are a few things to do to get started in case you don’t know what to do.
1. Figure out what your cause is. Find a niche within your cause that you are the most passionate about. For example, there is no way that I can advocate for every single diabetes issue out there. I will spread my self way too thin and not get anything accomplished. So, I have decided a couple of years ago to focus strictly on policy issues that effect people with diabetes.
2. Where do you want to advocate? You don’t need a blog in order to be an advocate. You can do a lot with Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, etc. You can even use Medium to write long form content if you want to (and Medium makes it a lot easier to go ‘viral’). If you are familiar with a certain platform, stick to that and master it before branching out to every platform.
3. What’s stopping you? What’s stopping you is most likely an excuse. “I don’t have time” Yea.. how much do you know about The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones or binge watching Gilmore Girls on Netflix? “I’m not tech savvy”…. Write letters, do local in person support groups / meet ups, etc.
4. Now go…. seriously, go right now. And come back tomorrow to read the throwback post.