SCIL Formal Advocacy Service

All the staff team at SCIL will act as advocates of one sort or another while working for the organisation and provide a valuable service to Disabled People.  However we also have a formal Advocacy Service that is based within the Empowerment Training and Consultancy Team.

The main difference between the two types of advocacy services is that the Formal Advocacy Service is far more able to be flexible about what is can do, as we are independent and not subject to restrictions about what we can and cannot do.

We use social work students on placement within the team to act as our advocates, as having advocacy skills is a Key Role within social work training. However, service users you do have a choice, to have one of the students acting as their advocate or having another member of the team.

All the formal advocates are supervised and managed by Jeff Downing and to date we have provided advocacy to over 690 Disabled People, mainly in Southampton and Hampshire. We cover a wide range of issues, such as discrimination, housing, making complaints and have your impairment related expenses being taken into account while being charged for services.