About
Advocacy Lab provides equitable services to empower impacted community members, organizers, and nonprofits to strategize, organize, and plan for meaningful engagement in the legislative process. Advocacy Lab also provides support for accessing and obtaining government services and resources.
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The legislative process is fast paced, convoluted, and often not transparent. The system also demands that those influencing the system know how to navigate its complexities. There is no publicly available roadmap on how to meaningfully navigate, access and influence the legislative process. Nor is there a guide available on how to access and obtain government services and resources. The system falls short when it does not go to the impacted community and ask them to lead the process of defining the problem and constructing the solution.​
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Feeling equipped, empowered, and supported to navigate and influence these government systems is paramount to amplifying community experiences and realities into the policy making arena including how to more easily access government resources and services.
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Advocacy Lab works to empower the community for legislative engagement while also educating the legislative process to meaningfully engage the community.
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At Advocacy Lab we believe diversity, equity and inclusion are essential to good policy making, and that policy making without representation from the impacted community often results in unintended consequences, misuse of resources and services, and a “solution to a problem” that may not be wanted and could cause harm to the impacted community.
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Advocacy Lab believes equitable policy making and access to government services and resources requires meaningful community engagement from impacted communities and stakeholder organizations.
Founder and Operator
Abbey Philips is a macro Social Worker by training and began her public policy career with a goal of centering equity, eliminating racism, discrimination, barriers to economic mobility, and creating systemic change in my work. For the past ten years, she has served in both the Executive and Legislative branches and nonprofit sector in Virginia. She ran special projects in the Governor's office as Assistant Secretary of the Commonwealth and was Chief of Staff to a state legislator for 9 years in the Virginia House of Delegates and the Virginia Senate.
In these roles Abbey was committed to empowering and uplifting the voices of community members, organizers and nonprofits to be heard in government spaces and the policy arena. She has also seen first hand how power, money and stature can provide access and influence in the government and policy making arena. Unfortunately, this influence and its corresponding outcomes can often be in direct contrast to what impacted communities want and require to live in an equitable and just world.
Abbey founded Advocacy Lab as a resource hub that provides no-cost to low-cost hands on technical support to help more people and organizations shape the legislative process and equitably obtain government services and resources. Abbey's vision through Advocacy Lab is to build a network of support that increases community and organizational advocacy engagement with the goal of creating equitable policy outcomes and increased access to government services and resources.
Advocacy Lab's Vision
At Advocacy Lab we strive to create an environment where everyone has equitable access to meaningful engage and influence their government and legislative process while also preparing the government to meaningfully engage the community.
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