This is an interesting read and I think extremely relevant right now. These are two of the paragraphs that set up the rest of the article. I imagine it might get political so I posted it here.

 

Action vs. Advocacy

 

"I have had a running dialogue with a guy I know about this topic, and I have been pretty unenthused with his overall efforts to "help" others because he has been firmly in the "Advocacy" camp since he decided to "help" others. I know his heart is in the right place, but watching his enthusiasm for talking about a problem left me feeling like I was dealing with some kind of [BLEEP]-heel car salesman every time we talked. Now, I almost felt bad for the gut feeling I had about this guy... because I KNOW he's a good person and wants to help. He kind of called me out for my lack of patience with him, and I took some time to think about why I was so viscerally influenced by his efforts to do things for others.
 
In America right now we have a HUGE push for advocacy. Awareness is some kind of tag line that people think means "doing good" when truly, advocacy is just talking. It reminds me of the 20th century push to remove production jobs from America and turn us into a think tank/services rich economy. It was as if we were yelling "let those unwashed masses do all our heavy lifting, we invented A/C let's sit in it." Right now it feels like our efforts to "help" others are very similar. We do things like host bake sales, or fund raise by getting companies to donate a portion of their already allocated budget to our charity of choice, or we run in races to "raise awareness". That's totally doing something, right? Wrong."

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