Hi everyone! My name is Emily, and I would consider myself a food allergy advocate. You might think that that means something big (such as being like Greta Thunberg), but in reality, it doesn’t. In fact, you can be one too! And I am going to tell you how in this article, so keep reading.
I started advocating in January of 2020 with FARE’s Teen Advisory Group, also known as TAG. I worked on projects such as writing for a blog, emailing school districts about food allergies and food insecurity, and even writing a book about food allergies. These were projects that I could even work on from home!
I started my blog, nallergy, a little later that year, around May. I worked on this and my social media accounts, and I recently reached the milestone of 500 followers on Instagram.
Notice that none of what I am doing is considered world-changing. You don’t need to be world-changing in order to make a change. You just need to be passionate about what you are advocating for, and you need to have hope to change the future.
Now, for all of you who want to advocate for food allergies or anything else, here is what I recommend to do. First, of course, you need to choose a cause, such as childhood cancer, homelessness, food allergies, or anything else. For this blog post, we’re going to be focusing on food allergies.
To get started, I would recommend finding a teen advocacy group. You can join FARE’s Teen Advisory Group, which I definitely recommend! You can read about my experience on it here. If you’re having a hard time finding a teen advocacy group, you can always join webinars, learn from online courses, or even just learn from blogs about the cause and how you can help.
The next course of action is just to get started. There may seem like there’s not much to do to help, which was definitely my mindset before I joined FARE TAG, but there is so much you can do to help. You can write blog posts, start a social media account, fundraise, start a club, write a book, etc. The options for how to advocate are endless!
Fundraising is actually quite a broad category of how to help in your cause. If you have a talent, you can fundraise. You can fundraise through a sport, a musical talent, an artistic talent, a competition, etc. You can even fundraise through streaming video games if that’s something you’re interested in.
In conclusion, it’s honestly pretty simple to advocate for food allergies, even as a teen. It’s also fun if you advocate by doing something you like! If you just start, you will make such a difference in the world, even if it’s just one person’s world that you are changing.
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