Advocacy Anxiety: Dismantling Fear and Resistance and Engaging Graduate Students in Public Policy

Field Organization To Academia

Upon joining my state’s counseling organization as the public policy & legislation chair (as well as joining as the public policy and legislation chair for my state’s mental health counseling association - a subdivision of the state’s organization), I was warmly welcomed because both positions were currently unfilled. As a new professional in my field, I wondered to myself—why is it that these positions were unfilled? Advocacy is widely preached, discussed, and promoted within the counseling profession— how is it that this organizational vehicle to tangibly deliver advocacy is unfilled? Regardless, I felt honored and inspired to service and provide the field organizer knowledge I accrued from my personal social justice activism experiences to my professional identity.

Outside of my academic and professional counseling experiences, I volunteer and hold leadership positions with social justice organizations such as Planned Parenthood Votes [state] and the Northwest Abortion Action Fund. Additionally, I volunteered with fellow progressive sister organizations, such as Reclaim [state], Conservation Voters of [state], and with senate and legislative campaigns with progressive platforms. From these experiences, I have gained invaluable knowledge and experiences related to field organizing—particularly, grassroots organizing with a progressive, social justice-oriented lens in a conservative state. I have canvassed, phone banked, written legislative testimony, tabled events, crowd canvassed at rallies, written letters, and engaged in meetings with legislators about abortion rights, comprehensive sex education, expansion of Medicaid services, gender identity and sexual orientation inclusion as protected classes, and many more problematic issues in my state. All of these issues in which we funneled outreach, support, and education to voters and legislators to our state to promote awareness of how policy impacts our state’s most marginalized populations—rural, black, brown, queer, and indigenous communities. These actions provided an opportunity for me to express my passion and educational background in social justice issues into practice; it was invigorating to experience change, even incrementally, in a tangible form. Field organizing was the flashlight I hungered for to illuminate the dark path between academic, social justice-oriented ideology and palpable, systematic change in policy in my community.

Implementing field organization into academia is accessible in undergraduate programs. Through service-learning opportunities required by humanities and social science courses, students have exposure to building relationships with non-profit, policy-oriented organizations that are designed to engage students via experiential activities and subsequent reflection. Additionally, service-learning experiences foster collaborative relationships between students and policy-oriented careers to explore upon completion of undergraduate coursework.

Service-learning opportunities are far less common in graduate coursework in comparison to graduate coursework—parallel to the absence of other experiential learning opportunities. This absence is particularly concerning as graduate coursework is frequently focused on professional training, commonly leading to terminal professional degrees and licensure. When considering the importance of incorporating the micro to macro lens of professional, graduate training, implementation of public policy knowledge and training is critical to ensuring quality lifespan of a professional career field. Thus, it is imperative that experiential learning is incorporated not only into graduate training but also into experiential, public policy-oriented service learning.