Once advocates have familiarized themselves with the issue and begun to understand the interests of their partners in the criminal justice and mental health systems, there are a variety of concrete strategies that they can undertake to spearhead reform. Each of these strategies involves partnering with the criminal justice and mental health systems in order to translate the passion of advocacy into the reality of systems change.

Many advocates have used multiple strategies at once, and the options described in this section are not meant to be mutually exclusive. Rather, they are tools that can be adapted and combined in a manner appropriate to a given community, as shown by the examples included in this section.xli

• Document the problem
• Engage the media
• Hold a local or statewide forum
• Form a community-wide coalition
• Launch a campaign or organization
• Build advocacy alliances with criminal justice partners