The ways in which citizens can influence legislative branch activity are almost limitless. Some of the many things citizens can do include:

• Suggest ideas for laws and draft them up;
  
• Build public support and educate others about an issue;
  
• Draw attention to proposed laws by working with the media;
  
• Testify as to the merits of bills you care about;
  
• Analyze budgets and offer alternatives, and
  
• Lobby for, or against, passage of various bills and budget items.

Some situations offer special opportunities. For example, the fact that most state legislators have little or no paid staff makes them heavily reliant on citizens to offer ideas for legislation, provide the research, and even identify potential witnesses for hearings. In effect, citizens can act as "staff" for the legislators (some actually work in their legislators' offices as volunteers). At the national level, where there is paid staff, meeting with staff can often be as good as (or sometimes better than) meeting with their bosses. All can use the help of good advocates.

Advocacy groups have a special role to play. For example, they can bring up issues that would otherwise get missed (like the lack of services for emotionally troubled youth). Advocates can assure that those directly affected (in this case, the families of troubled teens) do not find themselves waging lonely battles for better policies, and can spread the word to likely allies. And advocates can push the limits of a debate, thus insuring that something more than the easy, politically popular causes, get attention.

Sometimes advocates build on past victories. Advocates for people with disabilities have won a series of stunning legislative victories at the federal level using a variety of techniques - drafting laws, testifying, using media, staging protests, lobbying for passage. In 1975 they won passage of the Education for all Handicapped Children Act. Then, after years of struggle, they convinced the Congress and the President that it was in the national interest to go a step farther. In 1990 they won passage of the ADA - the Americans with Disabilities Act. That law extends the protections of the Civil Rights Act to everyone with physical or mental disabilities by ensuring equal access to employment, state and local government programs, and the benefits of life enjoyed by all Americans.

A few years later they built on the heightened visibility won through the ADA fight to win improvements affecting education, and the EHCA became IDEA - Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Together these laws are transforming the lives of millions of Americans with disabilities, and everyone who shares their communities.

Those laws did not come from some Senator, Representative, or well-paid lobbyist; they sprang directly from the mouths, pens, fact sheets, lives, and lobbying of countless people with disabilities, their families, friends, and advocates. When each of those bills was signed by a President, it marked one more victory - won not by some wealthy, insider elite, but by ordinary citizens, including those most directly affected.