Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Public Health Advocacy

Course Description

Smart ideas don’t sell themselves. Once you’ve developed strong evidence-based policy, your next step as a public health leader is to spark political and public change. This course will focus on impact: You’ll learn how to change the public and political discussions around your field, whatever your field is. Specifically, you’ll learn how to build an integrated advocacy plan from its elements:
– Shaping a public health organization to undertake public advocacy;
– Mitigating the risk of polarization, while embracing urgency;
– Using journalism disciplines to shape a public discussion around that advocacy;
– Focusing on actionable policy requests and targeting specific decision-makers;
– Building alliances with other organizations that will be effective in advocating for the targeted policy.

This course will mentor you as a current public health leader, already facing an urgent need to create change in your field. We’ll teach using frameworks, but with a heavy emphasis on application; you’ll learn these skills in the context of the very issues that are your day-to-day focus, at work or in your DrPH.

Course Objectives

By the end of this course, we want you to have strategies you can deploy right away if you choose – and a framework you can apply to your future impact work. Specifically, you will gain an introductory understanding of:

• Institutional and social contexts for advocacy:
  o How to orient public health organizations to participate in the public discussion, based on theories of change;
  o How to understand and assess polarization as a social determinant of health and how to balance the political value of polarization with mitigation of its risks;
• How to shape the public environment within which advocacy happens by using journalism disciplines, and by working effectively with journalists;
• How to shape the way political decision-makers discuss policy options by:
  o Understanding theories of policy and practice change;
  o Formulating actionable policy asks;
  o Participating in formal political and policy processes;
  o Building effective political alliances;
  o Working with community organizations and Indigenous governments;
• How to use Public Health crisis management as a foundation for trust in public health.

The course will also help build a range of CEPH competencies for the DrPH, particularly in the domains of “Leadership, Governance and Management”, and “Programs and Policy”.

Methods of Assessment

Participation	20%
Peer Feedback	10%
Story/Idea Pitch	20%
Scholarly Paper	20%
Integrated Advocacy Plan and Presentation	30%