Citizen Advocacy Stories
What do citizen advocates do?
Citizen advocate Richard Lane, an advocate for seven years, helps his protégé pay her bills, stay on budget, and to save a little money every month. We think of this as “kitchen-table financial management.”
Cathy Schmitz and her protégé get together socially, run errands together and enjoy one another’s company. One of the nicest ways this happens is when they share in the babysitting that Cathy is doing with her grandchildren.
Scott Cleaveland and his protégé spend time exploring Savannah and taking adventurous road trips together every Tuesday afternoon. Scott is helping his protégé’s family gather a group of concerned friends to help think about what an active, engaging and meaningful future would look like for his protégé and what plans need to be in place.
Uquevia Baker Romero visits her protégé regularly at the group home in which her protégé lives. Ms. Baker and her protégé are building a friendship, and Ms. Baker has invited some of her friends to help her with visiting and making sure her protégé is being treated well at the group home
Angie Johnson helps her protégé manage her finances and has been a mentor around parenting and family issues for more than 22 years during happy and hard times.
Nick Allen has helped his protégé get two job interviews and helped him look into Savannah Technical College for post-secondary education opportunities.
Piper Head discovered that her protégé, who was attending the special education program at Beach High School, is a talented artist with hopes of making art his career. After contacting a variety of local agencies that had more paperwork than vision, she worked with administrators at Armstrong State University, and got her protégé enrolled at ASU as an incoming freshman.
Local business owner Mike Carbo, an advocate for a year now, continues to learn from, enjoy and find new ways to be helpful to his protégé, who is blind, to get “the business of life,” like banking and shopping, done each week. These men, who come from very different backgrounds, keep finding common ground as they do some of the “business of life” together.
Solomon and Jo Amusan have been legal guardians for almost 20 years on behalf of a gentleman who has an intellectual disability, who has no family support, and who depends on our state’s human service system to provide him with a place to live and other supportive services.
