Community Advocacy - The Advonet Group

Community Advocacy can help you to understand, say what your choices are and be involved in what you need.

About the Service

If you feel that you not being heard by public services (NHS, Leeds City Council, Police, Social Care etc.) and require advocacy, we can support you with self-advocacy resources or at one of our hubs. We promote self-advocacy, so any work that we do with you, will be focused on helping you be able to advocate for yourself. If we feel that we can not provide you with the support you require, we will try to signpost you to an alternative service, or towards tools that you could use if appropriate.

Our self-advocacy resources can be found here and include:

A meeting planner
A phone call planner
A note-taking document for important meetings and events
A complaints template
Factsheets on important areas including housing, debt, benefits and homelessness

Please click on the button below for more information about the Community Hubs which are running this week.

Community Advocacy Hubs

Contact

0113 244 0606

[email protected]

Unit A3, Unity Business Centre,

26 Roundhay Road, Leeds, LS7 1AB

@advonetuk

What Does the Service Do?

We currently run three Community Advocacy Hubs every week. Two are in-person on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The other is run remotely for phone calls and video meetings every Wednesday.

Tuesdays 10am-1pm: Alternate weeks at Deacon House, Seacroft and the Armley Community Hub
Wednesdays 9am-1pm: Every week remotely, for online or phone meetings
Thursdays 12 Noon-3pm: Alternate weeks at the Reginald Centre, Chapeltown and the Dewsbury Road Community Hub, Beeston

The client can “drop in” to one of these sessions, but there is no guarantee an advocate will be available. If the client cannot be seen at that session, then they will be offered a booked appointment at a future session.

Alternatively, the client can arrange to be seen at a pre-agreed time during one of these sessions by calling our office (0113 244 0606) and arranging this through the First Contact Team. If the client is unable to get to one of the centres, then an advocate can call the client either by telephone or video call at a prearranged time during one of the sessions.

Please note that we provide a maximum of two 45-minute appointments per issue you need advocacy support for.

Who is the Service For?

This service is for anyone who resides in the Leeds City Council area that requires advocacy support around being heard by public services. If you are unsure as to whether advocacy support is what is right for you, please read our ‘What is advocacy?’ page.

Our priority will always be to assist clients to self-advocate wherever possible, therefore we encourage people to use our self-advocacy resources available on the website.

If a client requires one-to-one advocacy support at one of our hubs, the client should expect to leave the session with some ideas and practical tools to help progress their issue themselves.

If we feel that advocacy is not the best service for you, we will try to signpost you to alternative services.

What we Cannot Do

Please note that as our focus is advocacy, there are things that we cannot help you with. They include:

Forms of support work i.e. attending meetings, sending or filling forms, helping you understand information you have been given etc.
Giving advice. We can give information and signpost you to a service if needed but are unable to advise. If you need advice on an issue, Leeds Citizens Advice Bureau and Chapeltown Citizens Advice Bureau may be able to support you.
Support with legal or consumer rights.
Support with services outside of public or third sector bodies.

We can make exceptional circumstances for some issues. However, these will be on a case-by-case basis.

Further Information

As with our other advocacy services, we encourage you to do as much for yourself as you can. If you need support with this, we have free self-advocacy resources to help you speak up for yourself and your rights. Visit our Self-Advocacy Resources page to find them.

We are not able to facilitate community advocacy support outside of the remit of the hubs. If you require adjustments for us to support you, please feel free to contact us to discuss whether we can facilitate these. There is no guarantee that we will be able to, however we will try to support in the best way we can.