AALEP's PPA COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE : MISSION AND GOALS

Mission: The mission of AALEP’s Public Policy Advocacy (PPA) Community of Practice, hereafter referred to as the 'PPA Community of Practice' is to provide an environment for people working in the field of public policy advocacy (PPA) for the exchange of ideas, best practices, and business opportunities through a variety of learning, communication, and networking settings. The PPA Community of Practice serves its members by providing a hearty, highly participatory, and neutral platform for sharing professional ideas, concerns, and opportunities, as well as a vehicle for personal growth.

Goals: The PPA Community of Practice has 6 overarching goals:

1. To provide a platform for collaboration and a dynamic work space where practitioners, academics, researchers, and other interested parties from around the EU and beyond can openly discuss the practice and implications of Public Policy Advocacy no matter what their field or level of understanding.
2. To learn from each others’ experiences, successes, and failures to build expertise and capacity for conducting Public Policy Advocacy in the EU and abroad.
3. To develop and support Public Policy Advocacy best practices, lessons learned, and/or standards for conducting Public Policy Advocacy.
4. To look for collaboration points among certain projects.
5. To operate around the following governance principles: participation, transparency, responsiveness, consensus orientation, equity and inclusiveness, effectiveness and efficiency, accountability, and rules of engagement.
6. To evaluate the success of the PPA Community of Practice on an annual basis through participant surveys, a list of documents created and events held, and a summary of statistics.

Public Policy Advocacy is a relatively new profession that has garnered a lot of attention over the last decade within the EU and many different applications and methods of how to conduct Public Policy Advocacy have been suggested. The PPA Community of Practice can assist in developing a common language in the field of Public Policy Advocacy, providing guidance to those who are new to the profession and allowing those with an advanced understanding and experience in Public Policy Advocacy to coordinate their efforts in promoting the field.

A Community of Practice can assist in developing a common language in PPA, providing guidance to those who are new to the field, and allowing those with an advance understanding to coordinate their efforts in promoting the profession.

The PPA Community of Practice will enhance our profession by providing a coordinated, international, interdisciplinary approach, and multi-level approach to conducting Public Policy Advocacy. For the Public Policy Advocacy field to maintain its momentum and accomplish the purpose of providing decision makers with accurate information on the potential impacts of their decision within the population, it is critical that open communication takes place between practitioners, researchers and all concerned stakeholders.