Devane Murphy is the Associate Director of Debate at the University of Kentucky and a diversity expert with a specialty in nonprofit management. Devane was selected to take part in the first 2024 cohort of the LPA All Voices professional development program.

I spoke to Devane about the experience and where it may lead him next.

What drew you to apply for the All Voices program?

The thing that drew me in was that the program’s mission was very much in line with the things that I do in my day-to-day and in the lessons I try to instill in my students. I thought that the skills I’d learn in the program would be skills that could apply to a myriad areas of my life.

What was the experience like for you?

It was intense. Because it was 8 weeks straight. There's a lot to learn and there's a lot of content that we covered. But I really liked the pace. It never felt rushed. 

I was surprised at how different the advocacy examples were that Tim and John brought in. I didn’t expect that. Like, one of the exercises we did had us watching videos of advocates and talking about what we thought about them.

There's one person that was talking about his daughter dying. Another speaking about gay marriage. Another about heart disease. Another speaking about homelessness and drug addiction. This wide net of advocates. And here are these principles that we can apply to vastly different backgrounds and issues. I didn’t feel like I was learning that there was only one type of advocate. It was refreshing to see that.

I also had a great cohort. Working with Calondra and Jess was awesome. They both provided a different level of experience because they both do very different things. Calondra owns a consulting agency for nonprofits, so she's very much thinking about how to incorporate this into her business structure. Jess was working on a bunch of public advocacy talks while we were in the cohort. We were able to go over what Jess was going to say, workshop it with them and then watch them practice.

In fact, my favorite day of the program was actually a session where it was just me, Colondra and Jess. We knew a lot of the content by this time and so we were just pitching ideas, talking back and forth with each other. Kind of a round-table discussion about how we intend to incorporate things and ideas we were thinking about. It was really great to bounce ideas off of other professionals and learn from each other.

So, how have you implemented or plan on implementing what you learned in All Voices?

I'll be teaching classes in the fall on public speaking and argumentation and I’ll be using a few different things from the training in my classes. One thing in particular is LPA’s Whole Advocate model [https://www.livingproofadvocacy.com/our-approach]. I love that. It will be one of the first things that we go over in my class: how we’re going to be respecting each other and respecting personal experiences.

And there are two exercises that I really wanted to build on: The Six-Word Reason exercise and The Story Map. The Six Word Reason exercise is going to be something that I will 100% use in my courses.

The exercise was such an intuitive way of getting me as an advocate to say, “I know that I love all these things and I know that I'm like passionate about all these things, but what if I could reduce what I'm passionate to this small thing and identify and particularize what it is I am passionate about? What do I want my advocacy to be about?”

And The Story Map is kind of like a “living exercise.” It's one that I constantly come back to, add to, revise, improve upon, pull from.

Those two exercises will probably be some of the earlier lessons in my syllabus to help students have a path forward to the end of the semester, where it culminates in a big public advocacy talk. Having the Map and the Six-Word reason in the first two to three weeks will ensure that by Week Eight they'll know exactly what they need to write.

Now, having finished the All Voices program I'm pleasantly surprised that not only do I find myself coming back to the LPA textbook, Living Proof: Telling Your Story to Make a Differece, but as I'm writing the syllabus for my class, I'm going to be using tools in the online Coaches’ Portal that I now I have access to. I think that these are really big pools to draw from.

Learn more about LPA’s All Voices program.