Independent Advocacy Warwickshire

Independent Advocacy helps empower people to lead a full life by taking an asset based, community development approach to achieving our Vision - "Innovating ways to empower people to live fulfilling lives". We want to empower vulnerable people as a way to make them less vulnerable, improve their self-esteem and become more confident. We want people to be able to tell their own stories and have these listened to and understood. We use a theory of change for all our activities that shows how our work impacts on our users. It demonstrates how we achieve our ultimate goals within our model of empowerment and clearly evidences what our impact has been. It is based on the causal links to vulnerability and has five elements to each individual theory of change: Ultimate Goal, Intermediate Steps, Activities, Causal Links and Assumptions. Independent Advocacy runs a unique innovation hub which helps communities and individuals to come together to develop community solutions. It uses a range of community development approaches including participatory mapping, street surveys, street level conversations, etc. (which incorporates positive Personal and Social/Situational factors that lead people to be less vulnerable) to facilitate conversations and help to identify practical development at a street and neighbourhood level. We want to work with a wide range of people and agencies to help develop innovative ideas. Alongside our Community Innovation & Learning hub we also deliver free information and advice, advocacy, financial advocacy, community support and influence. We are committed to co-production and working with service users in evaluating and designing our services and are also seeking to increase community involvement in our work through further development of our existing volunteer base.