ABOUT

North Quabbin Citizen Advocacy (NQCA) is a not-for-profit association to develop and support relationships for people who will benefit from guidance, companionship, and/or advocacy. In each relationship, one partner (the protégé) has a mental disability or disorder.  The other partner (the advocate) has skills and interests that match the needs and interests of their disabled friend.

Why is NQCA’s work vital?

• Communities work best when we know, care about, stand by, and help each other.  The web of mutually beneficial relationships helps hold a community together.

• Communities work best when the web of people and relationships include us all—the poor, elderly, and disabled side by side with the rich, young, and able-bodied.

• The hard fact is that many—even most—disabled people are often not part of the community’s informal, mutually supportive web of relationships.  Without community support, disabled people become dependent on programs funded with state and federal dollars.  This dependence is not good for disabled people, their families, their neighbors, or their community.

• NQCA expands the web to include our disabled neighbors, and in doing so strengthens the web for us all.

   

What makes NQCA’s work different from other services that help disabled people?

• NQCA recruits and supports unpaid advocates to be helpful friends to disabled people.

• NQCA encourages caring and commitment and participation in community life.

• NQCA supports, but does not supervise, freely-given relationships.

• NQCA, through the relationships it supports, helps disabled people, their advocates, and the entire community as neighborly caring increases.

• NQCA trusts ordinary citizens using their common sense to monitor how human services, schools, doctors, and others treat our neighbors with disabilities.

Does Citizen Advocacy work?

• NQCA has been successfully fulfilling its mission for over thirty years.

• Of the 300+ relationships initiated, 90 are currently active, 12-15 new relationships are initiated each year.

• NQCA’s staff coordinators, work study student, and fourteen-member board are committed to continuing the program’s important work.

   

Does NQCA’s work have an impact beyond the North Quabbin area?

• Through newsletters, presentations, and discussions, NQCA’s work invites others to call forth more neighborly caring in other communities.

• Lessons from working with hundreds of people in caring relationships serve as a guide to others on the “how to” questions of initiating and supporting freely-given relationships.

Do you want to be an advocate or know someone who could use an advocate? Contact Us!

Our community needs Citizen Advocacy to engage us personally in assisting our disabled neighbors.  In doing so, NQCA builds community one relationship—two people—at a time.  NQCA works toward a vision of a genuinely caring community where all of us are welcomed, included, and valued.  Please help NQCA to fulfill its mission as we build toward this vision.