The Cost of Advocacy, Part I: The Price of Being Heard
Advocacy looks glamorous from the outside — the handshakes, the speeches, the professional photos with captions like “Making change happen!” But what you don’t see in the highlight reel is the tab.
Advocacy is expensive. Not just emotionally, but literally. It’s the $500 gala ticket you couldn’t afford, the last-minute flight you booked on faith, and the gallons of Diet Mountain Dew that keep you upright through another night of research and rewriting.
The Pay-to-Play Problem
To be taken seriously, you have to get in the right room. The problem is, those rooms cost money. Access isn’t earned by passion — it’s bought by presence.
Every conference, summit, or “leadership training” is another invoice to chase an audience with power. You’re not there for the catered chicken or the souvenir tote bag. You’re there because maybe someone might finally listen.
But here’s the truth: the people most driven to create change are often the ones least able to afford to. Advocacy is a system where the broke and broken fight to convince the comfortable and powerful that their struggles exist.
The Hidden Costs
What people don’t see are the 2 a.m. Google searches for the right contact. The hours rewriting a single paragraph so it won’t offend a politician’s talking points. The personal bills going unpaid so you can fund a trip that “might make a difference.”
It’s unpaid labor disguised as public service. You work without compensation, vacation, or validation — because to stop would feel like betrayal.
The Hope Investment
We buy hope like investors buying stock in humanity. Every flight, hotel, and gala ticket is a down payment on change we might not live to see.
We tell ourselves it’s worth it. Sometimes, it is. Sometimes, the meeting goes well. Sometimes, you walk away knowing your words landed. But more often, you walk out smiling for the photo and wondering if anyone really heard you.
That’s the price of being heard — the one they don’t put in the program or the press release.
— said by Tori Seals, because someone had to say it
