Lesson 13 · What are the opportunities for improving young people's health?
How young people advocate: past, current and future advocacy in communities
Lesson 12 ended with a column of conditions you cannot change by yourself. This is what you do with that column. Advocacy is the only strategy in this module that targets conditions rather than behaviours, and young people have a documented record of it in Australia. The hard part is not enthusiasm. It is knowing which audience can actually grant what you are asking for, and choosing a mode of communication that reaches them.
Take the condition you put in column three at the end of Lesson 12 — the one you said you would escalate. Write it down.
Now answer the question that decides whether anything happens: who, by name or by role, has the power to change it? Not “the government”. A person, a position, a committee, a council. If you cannot name one, that is the first piece of work, not a reason to stop.
- Define advocacy and distinguish it from health education, awareness-raising and personal behaviour change.
- Use various sources to examine an advocacy campaign, and judge each source rather than simply quoting it.
- Describe past advocacy by young Australians and identify what it actually changed.
- Describe current advocacy, including the ways digital modes have altered what a young person can do alone.
- Explain the role of individuals within their communities, and the ladder from a personal ask to a policy change.
- Choose a mode and an audience deliberately, and justify both — which is the communication outcome for this lesson.
- Advocacy — speaking or acting to change the conditions, decisions or policies that affect health, on your own behalf or on behalf of others.
- Self-advocacy — acting for your own health, such as asking for an adjustment, a referral or a second opinion.
- Decision-maker — the person or body with the authority to grant what is being asked for.
- The ask — the single specific thing a campaign wants done. Without one, a campaign is a mood.
- Mode — the form communication takes: a letter, a petition, a speech, a video, a meeting, a report, a protest, a design.
- Lived experience — knowledge held by the people a decision affects. The distinctive resource young people bring.
- Tokenism — involving young people visibly without giving them any influence over the decision.
- Source — anything you use as evidence about an issue or a campaign, from a news report to a peer-reviewed study to an oral history.
Advocacy is speaking or acting to change the conditions, decisions or policies that affect health — your own, or other people's. That single sentence sets it apart from everything else in the module, because every other strategy you have met works on what a person does. Advocacy works on what a person is doing it within.
Three things it is regularly confused with, and the distinction matters in an exam:
- Health education teaches a person something. Advocacy asks someone with authority to change something. A lesson about vaping is education; a submission arguing for enforcement near schools is advocacy.
- Awareness-raising makes an issue visible. That is often a necessary first step and it is not sufficient: awareness with no ask, and no decision-maker, changes nothing and is the commonest weakness in student campaign designs.
- Personal behaviour change is Lesson 12. Useful, bounded, and aimed at column one. Advocacy is aimed at column three.
Advocacy also has two directions, and the dot point names both. Self-advocacy is acting for your own health — asking a GP a question, requesting an adjustment at school, saying that a service did not work for you. Advocacy for others acts on behalf of people who may not be in a position to act for themselves, which is where the ethical behaviour from Lesson 11 reappears as something with a public form.
Every campaign needs an ask and an audience
Before anything else, a piece of advocacy has to answer two questions: what exactly is being asked for, and who can grant it? “Raise awareness of youth mental health” fails both. “Ask the council to extend the last bus on the route past the headspace centre from 5pm to 7pm” passes both, and it is small enough to win. A campaign with a specific ask directed at the body that can actually grant it is worth more than a large campaign aimed at nobody.
Quick check: Which of these is advocacy rather than health education or awareness-raising?
The dot point says using various sources, and those two words are assessable. “Various” means different kinds, not three news articles. Different kinds of source fail in different ways, which is exactly why using several of them is more reliable than using several of one.
| Source | Good for | Characteristic weakness |
|---|---|---|
| News reporting | What happened, when, and public reaction | Covers conflict and launches; rarely reports whether anything changed a year later |
| Campaign material | The ask, the argument, the intended audience | Written to persuade, so it states its own success and not its failures |
| Government and agency reports | Data, policy detail, what was formally decided | Slow, and written by a body with an interest in how it appears |
| Peer-reviewed research | Whether an approach works, with a method you can inspect | Lags by years, and often studies a different population from yours |
| Oral history and interview | Motive, cost, and what it was like from inside | Memory is selective, and one participant is not the campaign |
| Social media | Speed, reach, and the voice of the people affected | Visibility is not impact, and engagement is not evidence of change |
Four questions to put to any source, in this order. Who produced it, and what did they want? When — and has anything relevant happened since? What kind of claim is it making — that something happened, or that something worked? What would disagree with it, and did I look?
That last question is the one that separates a genuine examination from a collection of supporting quotes. If every source you have found agrees, the most likely explanation is not that the matter is settled; it is that you searched with the campaign's own words.
Currency is a source-quality issue in this topic specifically
Advocacy campaigns move fast. Anything you read about a current campaign — including examples in a textbook or on this page — describes a position at a point in time and may have been overtaken. Check the date on the source, then check whether something has happened since. An answer that says what a campaign achieved as at a stated date is stronger than one that states it timelessly, and it is honest.
True or false: A campaign's own material is a poor source for identifying what the campaign was asking for.
The clearest Australian example of young people advocating for other people's health is the 1965 Freedom Ride. A group of University of Sydney students, organised as Student Action for Aborigines and led by Charles Perkins, travelled by bus through towns in western and northern New South Wales to document and publicly challenge the segregation of Aboriginal people.
It belongs in a health course, not only a history one, because what they targeted was health infrastructure and access. Segregation at swimming pools, exclusion from clubs and cinemas, refusal of service, and the living conditions on the fringes of towns are all determinants of health in the sense Lesson 5 defined: environmental conditions and social exclusion that produce measurable differences in health outcomes. The students did not run a health education programme. They changed what was visible, and by doing so changed what was politically possible.
Four things worth extracting, because they generalise:
- They made a condition visible to people who could not otherwise see it. Bringing journalists is a strategy, not an accident.
- The ask was specific and local — admission to a particular pool in a particular town — while the argument was general.
- They acted for others, with Aboriginal students among them, which raises the question every campaign for someone else has to answer: who is leading, and who is being spoken for?
- The effect was indirect and delayed. No pool policy changed on the day the bus arrived. What changed was national attention, and that fed a longer process.
Other past advocacy worth knowing about in outline: the long tobacco-control campaign that moved Australia from advertised cigarettes to plain packaging, in which school and university students were a persistent voice; road-safety campaigns that produced graduated licensing for young drivers; and sustained campaigning for mental health services designed for young people rather than adapted from adult services.
Match each term to its meaning.
- Advocacy
- Self-advocacy
- The ask
- Tokenism
- Acting to change the conditions, decisions or policies that affect health
- Acting for your own health, such as requesting a referral or an adjustment
- The single specific thing a campaign wants a decision-maker to do
- Involving young people visibly while giving them no influence over the decision
Young people advocate now across a recognisable set of issues: mental health services and waiting times, consent and respectful relationships education, vaping and its marketing, climate change framed explicitly as a health issue, road safety, and access to sport and recreation in places that have little of it. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people advocate through community-controlled organisations and youth networks for services that are designed and delivered by community rather than for it.
Three genuine changes in what an individual can do, compared with 1965:
- The cost of reaching an audience has collapsed. A student can publish to thousands without an organisation, a budget or a journalist. Distribution used to be the barrier; it usually is not now.
- Testimony can be gathered at scale. Collecting many first-hand accounts used to require a research team. It is now something a young person can organise, and volume of lived experience is persuasive to decision-makers in a way that a single account is not.
- Formal channels for young people now exist. Youth advisory groups, youth parliaments, student representative structures, council youth committees and consultations run by bodies such as the NSW Advocate for Children and Young People give a route that does not depend on going public at all.
And three things that did not change, which is where most student answers go wrong. Visibility is still not impact — a post that reaches a hundred thousand people and no decision-maker has changed nothing. Someone still has to decide, which means someone still has to be asked, in a form they must respond to. And sustained pressure still beats a moment: the campaigns that win tend to be the ones still there when the news cycle has moved on.
Tokenism, and how to spot it
Young people are now routinely consulted. Consultation is not influence. The test is simple and worth applying to any youth advisory arrangement you examine: can you identify a decision that was made differently because of what the young people said? If the answer is that they were listened to, valued, and thanked, that is tokenism — visible participation with no power attached. It is worth naming, because a campaign that accepts a seat on a committee instead of an answer to its ask has usually been managed rather than heard.
Two truths and a lie. Which statement is false?
The dot point ends with the role of individuals within their communities, and the word within is doing the work. An individual advocating alone is the weakest version of this. An individual acting through the structures already around them is the strong one, because those structures come with an existing audience, a standing relationship with decision-makers, and continuity after the individual leaves.
There is a ladder, and the useful skill is knowing which rung a given issue sits on:
- Self-advocacy. Asking for what you need, for yourself. Requires only the help-seeking skill from Lesson 8.
- Advocating for one other person. Going with a friend, speaking to a teacher on their behalf, making the call they cannot make.
- Within an existing structure. Student representative council, team, club, youth group, community or cultural organisation. Small asks, fast decisions, real authority.
- Organised community campaign. A group, an ask, a named decision-maker, and enough persistence to outlast a news cycle.
- Policy advocacy. Submissions, consultations, youth advisory bodies, contact with elected representatives. Slow, and where durable change actually lives.
Then the communication decision, which is the part most often skipped. The audience determines the mode. Choose the decision-maker first and the mode second, never the reverse.
- A principal or council officer responds to a short written proposal with a cost, a timeline and a named contact — and to a meeting.
- A formal process responds to a submission that answers its terms of reference, and largely ignores anything that does not.
- A broad public responds to a story, an image or a video carrying one clear message.
- Other young people, whom you are recruiting rather than persuading, respond to a peer with a specific, achievable request to do something.
Fill the gaps. Type one word in each box.
Speaking or acting to change the conditions, decisions or policies that affect health is called . The single specific thing a campaign wants done is called the , and it must be directed at a decision-maker who can grant it. Involving young people visibly while giving them no influence over the decision is called .
Activities · put the method to work
Choose one campaign in which young people advocated for health — the Freedom Ride, or a current one you can find sources on. Then examine it using three different kinds of source from the table in Card 05, and put the four questions to each.
For each source: who produced it and what did they want, when was it made, is it claiming something happened or that something worked, and what would disagree with it?
Then, across all three: what was the ask, who was the decision-maker, what mode was used, and what actually changed — as at the date of your most recent source?
Finally: name one thing your three sources disagree about, or one thing none of them can tell you. Every real examination has one.
Odd one out. Three of these are acts of advocacy. Which one is not?
Take the condition from card 01 — or one from your researched issue in Lesson 9 — and design the advocacy. Write all seven parts:
- The condition, and which determinant of health from Lesson 5 it belongs to.
- The ask, in one sentence, beginning with a verb.
- The decision-maker, by name or role, and why it is them and not someone more impressive.
- The rung of the ladder you are on, and why that one is the right level for this ask.
- The mode, with one sentence justifying it by reference to that audience.
- Your evidence: the two or three things you would put in front of them, including at least one piece of lived experience and one piece of data.
- What a “no” looks like, and what you would do next. Most asks are refused first.
Then a short paragraph on the ethics: whose health is this for, whether you are speaking for people who could speak for themselves, and how you would avoid the tokenism problem running in the other direction.
Examine how young people have advocated for their own and others' health, referring to past and current advocacy.
Examine means inquire into — identify the components and investigate how they work, rather than simply listing examples. The question names past and current, so the structure is comparative, and the marks sit in what the comparison reveals.
Plan: define advocacy against conditions, one past case with what it targeted, current forms and what digital changed, then what stayed constant across both. Close on the individual within community structures.
Advocacy is speaking or acting to change the conditions, decisions or policies that affect health, whether on one's own behalf or on behalf of others. It is distinct from health education, which changes what a person knows, and from awareness-raising, which makes an issue visible without necessarily asking anyone to do anything; advocacy requires a specific ask directed at a decision-maker with the authority to grant it.
In the 1965 Freedom Ride, University of Sydney students organised as Student Action for Aborigines and led by Charles Perkins travelled through towns in western and northern New South Wales to document and publicly challenge segregation. Although usually remembered as a civil-rights action, what it targeted were determinants of health: exclusion from swimming pools and public facilities, refusal of service, and living conditions on the fringes of towns. The students acted for others rather than for themselves, made a condition visible to a national audience by bringing journalists, and kept the ask local and specific while the argument remained general.
Current advocacy by young Australians addresses mental health services, consent education, vaping, climate change as a health issue and access to recreation, and operates through both public campaigning and formal channels such as youth advisory bodies and consultations. Three things have changed: the cost of reaching an audience has collapsed, first-hand testimony can be gathered at a scale that once needed a research team, and formal routes for young people now exist. Three have not: visibility is not impact, someone still has to be asked in a form they must answer, and sustained pressure still outperforms a moment of attention.
Advocacy is speaking or acting to change the conditions, decisions or policies that affect health, on one's own behalf or on behalf of others, and it is distinct from health education, which changes what a person knows, and from awareness-raising, which makes an issue visible without asking anyone to act; advocacy requires a specific ask directed at a decision-maker able to grant it. Past advocacy by young Australians is illustrated by the 1965 Freedom Ride, in which University of Sydney students organised as Student Action for Aborigines and led by Charles Perkins travelled through towns in western and northern New South Wales to document and challenge segregation. Although remembered as a civil-rights action, what it targeted were determinants of health — exclusion from swimming pools and public facilities, refusal of service, and living conditions on the fringes of towns — and its method was to make a condition visible to a national audience, with a local and specific ask carrying a general argument, and with its effect delayed and indirect rather than immediate. Current advocacy addresses mental health services and waiting times, consent education, vaping, climate change framed as a health issue, and access to recreation, and it runs through both public campaigning and formal channels such as youth advisory bodies, submissions and consultations, with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people advocating through community-controlled organisations for services designed by community rather than for it. Comparing the two periods, three things have changed: reaching an audience now costs almost nothing, lived-experience testimony can be gathered at scale by an individual, and formal routes for young people exist that do not require going public at all. Three have not: visibility is not impact, since a campaign reaching a very large audience and no decision-maker changes nothing; someone must still be asked in a form they are obliged to answer; and sustained pressure still outperforms a single moment of attention. What both periods share is the role of the individual within a community rather than alone — acting through a student body, a club, a cultural or community organisation supplies an existing audience, a standing relationship with decision-makers, and continuity after the individual has moved on, which is why organised advocacy converts into changed conditions and isolated advocacy usually does not.
Explain why using a range of sources is important when examining advocacy for young people's health.
Explain wants cause and effect: what goes wrong with one kind of source, and how does using several kinds fix it? The answer has to name the failure modes specifically, because “to get a balanced view” is a sentence with no content in it.
Plan: the general principle that different source types fail differently, then three named types with their specific weakness, then the fourth question about disagreement, then the currency problem.
Different kinds of source are unreliable in different ways, so using several of one kind multiplies a single blind spot while using several kinds allows each to cover what the others cannot see. "Various sources" therefore means various in kind, not merely several in number.
Campaign material states the ask and the argument accurately, because the campaign wrote it, but is produced to persuade and will report its successes rather than its failures. News reporting establishes what happened and when, but follows conflict and launches, and rarely returns to say whether anything changed a year later. Government reports carry the policy detail and the data but are slow and are written by a body with an interest in how it appears. Social media conveys the voice of those affected at speed, but engagement is a measure of attention and not of impact.
Different kinds of source are unreliable in different ways, so relying on several sources of one kind multiplies a single blind spot, whereas using several kinds allows each to cover what the others cannot see; "various sources" therefore means various in kind rather than merely several in number. Campaign material states the ask and the argument accurately because the campaign produced it, but is written to persuade and reports its successes rather than its failures. News reporting establishes what happened and when, but follows conflict and launches and seldom returns to report whether anything changed a year later. Government and agency reports carry policy detail and data but are slow and are produced by a body with an interest in how it appears, while oral history and interview supply motive and cost from the inside but are selective, since one participant is not the campaign. Social media conveys the voice of those affected at speed, but engagement measures attention rather than impact, which matters particularly in this topic because a campaign may be highly visible and have reached no decision-maker at all. Using a range of sources also makes disagreement visible, and disagreement is informative: if every source located agrees, the likeliest explanation is that the search used the campaign's own language rather than that the matter is settled. Finally, advocacy campaigns change position quickly, so every source describes a situation at a point in time; comparing sources of different dates is what allows a conclusion to be stated accurately as at a particular date rather than timelessly, which is the difference between an examination of a campaign and a summary of its publicity.
Go back to card 01, where you named a condition and tried to name who could change it. Look at your answer now. Was the person you named actually the decision-maker, or were they simply the most senior person you could think of? Those are rarely the same, and asking the wrong one is the commonest reason a real campaign gets nowhere. Rewrite the ask and the audience with what you now know, and add the one thing you did not include the first time: what you would do when the answer is no.
Multiple choice · 5 questions
MC 1. Advocacy is best distinguished from health education because advocacy:
- A. reaches a larger audience
- B. seeks to change conditions, decisions or policies rather than what a person knows
- C. is carried out by young people rather than teachers
- D. uses digital rather than printed communication
MC 2. The two things every piece of advocacy must have are:
- A. a large audience and a budget
- B. a specific ask and a decision-maker who can grant it
- C. media coverage and a social media account
- D. a survey and a slogan
MC 3. Which of these is the characteristic weakness of a campaign's own material as a source?
- A. It cannot tell you what the campaign was asking for
- B. It is always out of date
- C. It is produced to persuade, so it reports successes rather than failures
- D. It is not written by anyone involved
MC 4. In examining the 1965 Freedom Ride as health advocacy, the most relevant point is that it:
- A. was organised by university rather than school students
- B. targeted determinants of health such as exclusion from public facilities and living conditions
- C. received extensive media coverage at the time
- D. took place in New South Wales
MC 5. A youth advisory group is most likely to be tokenistic if:
- A. its members are drawn from several schools
- B. it meets less often than once a term
- C. no decision can be identified that was made differently because of what its members said
- D. it communicates its work through a written report
Short answer · exam style
SA 1. Understand Band 4 Distinguish between advocacy, health education and awareness-raising, using an example of each. (4 marks)
SA 2. Apply Band 5 Explain why using a range of sources is important when examining advocacy for young people's health. (5 marks)
SA 3. Analyse Band 6 Examine how young people have advocated for their own and others' health, referring to past and current advocacy. (6 marks)
📖 Comprehensive answers (click to reveal)
Multiple choice: 1 → B. 2 → B. 3 → C. 4 → B. 5 → C.
Activity 1 guidance: The work is marked on the judging, not the finding. Three sources of the same kind is the commonest error and scores poorly no matter how good each one is. The second commonest is treating the campaign's own site as neutral: it is the best source for the ask and the worst for the outcome. The third question — name something your sources disagree about or cannot tell you — is the one that proves the examination was real; the most frequent honest answer is that none of them says whether the change survived, because news follows launches and rarely returns.
Activity 2 guidance: Check the design against three tests. Is the ask a single sentence beginning with a verb, and could the named person actually grant it? Students routinely aim at a minister when the decision belongs to a principal or a council officer, which guarantees no result. Does the mode follow from the audience rather than from what the student enjoys making? And is there a plan for a refusal? An ask with no next step after "no" is a request, not a campaign. The ethics paragraph should name who holds the lived experience and how they are involved, since advocating for others without them is precisely the pattern the tokenism idea warns against, running in the other direction.
SA 1 (4 marks): Advocacy is speaking or acting to change the conditions, decisions or policies that affect health, on one's own behalf or on behalf of others — for example students presenting a costed proposal to a school executive to reopen the gym at lunchtime and asking for a decision by a set date [2]. Health education changes what a person knows or can do, and targets the individual rather than the conditions — for example a lesson delivered to Year 7 on vaping [1]. Awareness-raising makes an issue visible without necessarily asking anyone to do anything — for example wearing a colour to mark a mental health awareness week; it can be a necessary first step but changes nothing on its own, because it has no ask and no decision-maker [1].
SA 2 (5 marks): State the principle: different kinds of source are unreliable in different ways, so several of one kind multiply a single blind spot while several kinds cover each other, and “various” means various in kind [1]. Name the weaknesses specifically: campaign material is accurate about the ask and written to persuade [1]; news reporting establishes what happened but follows launches and rarely revisits [1]; government reports carry the data but are slow and self-interested, and social media measures attention rather than impact [1]. Add the two analytical points: a range of sources makes disagreement visible, and unanimity usually indicates a search conducted in the campaign's own language; and because campaigns move quickly, comparing sources of different dates is what lets a conclusion be stated accurately as at a date rather than timelessly [1].
SA 3 (6 marks): Define advocacy against health education and awareness-raising, with the ask-and-audience criterion [1]. Past: the 1965 Freedom Ride, its organisers and method, and critically the health link — it targeted determinants of health including exclusion from pools and public facilities and living conditions on town fringes [2]. Current: mental health services, consent education, vaping, climate change as a health issue and access to recreation, through both public campaigning and formal channels including youth advisory bodies, and through community-controlled organisations for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people [1]. The comparison: reach, testimony at scale and formal routes have changed; visibility still is not impact, someone must still be asked in a form they must answer, and sustained pressure still beats a moment [1]. Conclude on the individual within the community: acting through existing structures supplies an audience, a relationship with decision-makers and continuity, which is why organised advocacy converts to changed conditions and isolated advocacy usually does not [1].
Advocacy is the strategy that works on conditions, which is why it follows Lesson 12 rather than preceding it: you have to be able to tell a condition from a behaviour before you can target one. Every piece of advocacy needs an ask and an audience, and most student campaigns fail the second test rather than the first.
Examine advocacy with several kinds of source, because each kind is blind in its own way, and check the date on everything. Past and current advocacy by young Australians differ in reach and speed far more than in what makes them work — visibility was never impact, and someone always has to be asked.
Keep this one: an individual is strongest acting within a community structure, not alone. Lesson 14 takes that seriously and looks at the organisations themselves — government, non-government and community — and at what they actually achieve for young people's health.
Mark lesson as complete
Tick when you've finished the practice and review.