Advocacy always involves spreading your message and gaining support for your advocacy.
Parent Education, or Parent Ed for short, is a great strategy to get the word out and reach parents. By offering up a speaker in an area that is interesting to parents, you can get your message out in a way that is palatable to the community, and that accesses communication channels like email lists that are typically closed to advocacy.
In my work, I joined the PTA – PTA Council here in Palo Alto, as they have an organizational overview across all the individual school site PTAs – and then held Parent Ed events in the area of nutrition.
I started by reaching out to the community and organizations to find speakers who would be willing to come in and give pro-bono talks to our parents and students. Having no budget, I avoided paid speakers which would have been great but was simply too expensive to do. Still here in Palo Alto and the SF Bay, there is no shortage of great, talented, notable people working in many different fields in nutrition.
I held the talks in the evening, so as to catch parents after work. I invited their children whenever possible, and we often had kids who enjoyed our talks as well.
I brought in healthy snacks to model the nutritional messages my speakers delivered. Since these talks were held around dinner time, snacks were very welcome, and the kids would often eat the bulk of the food that was there!
I recorded each event and uploaded the video to Youtube so that others could view them later, if they could not attend. Whenever possible, I also provided the presentation, and additional materials via Dropbox download.
I asked everyone to sign an attendance sheet and leave their email address. I used the email addresses to build a nutrition email list, to which I sent future parent ed talk announcements.
Advertising-wise I created flyers which I would print out and put up on every bulletin board at every school site across the district. I would also take a graphic version of it and post it on social media. In our district, we have a strong WeChat presence and so I would post this graphic there. I also created a blurb to insert into our weekly electronic news which is run by the PTA.
Last, I would spend a little bit of money on a raffle giveaway, usually favorite books of the speaker, as an added incentive and thank you for attending. Plus, they were usually nutrition related books so I could further advocacy of the healthy nutrition message.
This worked well but it was reaching only small groups of people, about 20-50 people at a time and only once or twice a year. Last school year 2018-19, the district held a Family Leadership Summit which had a range of speakers. I heard about it late and couldn’t go but one thing I noticed that the speaker list was very lacking in health and wellness speakers! So I asked to be on the planning committee and this year, I decided to stuff all my parent ed speakers into this event. Last time it was held, there were about 300 people in attendance, so my speakers, and my advocacy, would reach far more people at one time. They project 500 people this year, maybe more, so my reach for speakers has a much greater potential than just a separate parent ed event on an evening.
I have great hopes that the Family Leadership Summit will be a great venue for bringing my advocacy message to more people. The search continues for ways to spreading the word…