The Folklore Advocacy Toolkit is a guide to promoting and sustaining folklore work in the United States, including tips specific to nonprofit organizations, higher education, independent folklorists, and community scholars. This online version has been created to to give you quick access to some of the Toolkit’s essential content. Soon, you’ll be able to download the newest edition of the toolkit as a .pdf.
Using the Toolkit
This toolkit is designed to provide all folklorists (broadly defined) with concrete suggestions and examples for how advocacy may benefit their work. This guide is divided into three main sections:
Why Advocate?Introduces the foundational concepts around advocacy for the folk and traditional arts and provides some basic examples for how we, as folklorists, can begin advocating in the communities we serve.
Advocacy as a…? This section focuses on the various roles as folklorists within which we may find ourselves advocating: whether as folklorists for the field generally, or public folklorists, academic folklorists, independent folklorists, and cultural practitioners.
Advocate for and with…? This section considers the recipient of the advocacy. What individuals, groups, or institutions can benefit from the advocacy of folklorists? Here you’ll find recommendations for advocating for and with your local community, your programs and agencies, your own research and projects, and the field of folklore studies as a whole.
Reach Out: This section considers who we need to reach out to in order to spread the word, develop support, or raise funds. Here we discuss reaching out to the government, to the mass media, to social media, and through creative endeavors to share and support our work as folklorists.
Make a Plan: Ready to start advocating? This section will help guide you step by step through the process of developing an advocacy plan to meet your specific goals.
Case Studies
Throughout the toolkit, you will encounter case studiesthat provide real-world examples of how and where folklorists from across the field advocate. We are always on the lookout for more examples of this work, so please share any examples you may have with us so that we can add them to the toolkit.