Community Advocacy Posted on January 20, 2009 Hortensia Amaro (bio) explains how researchers can help participants become advocates and affect policy.

I think researchers have a very important role, and I think a responsibility, to communicate to policy makers. I know in my own graduate training we were trained that your role ends as a researcher when you publish the paper and somebody else is going to pick it up from the shelf and figure out what the policy implications or the practice implications are.

But I'm very interested in the translation of research to practice and also to policy, so for example in our own work for about 12 years we have been holding yearly events at the State House, where we bring families in recovery in.

We bring administrative leadership, the commissioners of mental health, of criminal justice, of addictions treatment, et cetera, and we train women in recovery and their families to be advocates with policy makers.

And we try to, through that process and through our own research, inform policies in our state and funding of certain initiatives. For example, our work on co-occurring disorders in women and our results from our studies on integrated treatment of mental illness, trauma, and addiction have had a big impact in how our state looks at these issues.

We were able to use that research as well as the work we were doing directly with women, who also then became advocates on behalf of these issues, with policymakers to develop, policy makers became more aware of the need for this integrated treatment approach and communication across these different departments in our state.

There has been a committee in the legislature that looks at these issues on an ongoing basis, more funding and changes in the criteria for licensure for substance abuse treatment programs, for example, where they now are required to provide more integrated services.

So we've seen a change in the awareness of the importance of co-occurring disorders in this population, the need to break down barriers across agencies that have provided very separate and disjointed services to have more seamless systems of care.

And legislators are now aware of these issues, and also women and their families who receive services are able to articulate this and be advocates on behalf of these issues.