Common issues include diseases (e.g. breast cancer, AIDS), conflicts (e.g. the Darfur genocide, global warming), movements (e.g. Greenpeace, PETA, Earth Hour) and political parties or politicians.
Since informing the populace of a public concern is often regarded as the first step to changing how the institutions handle it, raising awareness is often the first activity in which any advocacy group engages.
However, in practice, raising awareness is often combined with other activities, such as fundraising, membership drives or advocacy, in order to harness and/or sustain the motivation of new supporters which may be at its highest just after they have learned and digested the new information.
[2] Until the early-17th century, English speakers used the word "consciousness" in the sense of "moral knowledge of right or wrong"—a concept today referred to as "conscience".
From then on she sort of made it an institution and called it consciousness-raising.On Thanksgiving 1968, Kathie Sarachild presented A Program for Feminist Consciousness Raising, at the First National Women's Liberation Conference near Chicago, Illinois, in which she explained the principles behind consciousness-raising and outlined a program for the process that the New York groups had developed over the past year.
[6] Susan Brownmiller, a member of the West Village[a] would later write that small-group consciousness raising "was the movement's most successful form of female bonding, and the source of most of its creative thinking.
[11] Ellen Willis wrote in 1984 that consciousness raising has often been "misunderstood and disparaged as a form of therapy", but that it was, in fact, in its time and context, "the primary method of understanding women's condition" and constituted "the movement's most successful organizing tool."
At the same time, she saw the lack of theory and emphasis on personal experience as concealing "prior political and philosophical assumptions".
[15] This focus has also been studied by other feminist scholars as a new approach to women's literary writing experience,[16] and the usage of critical consciousness through the creation of art as a liberatory praxis.
The idea of coming out as a tool of consciousness-raising had been preceded by even earlier opinions from German theorists such as Magnus Hirschfeld, Iwan Bloch and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, all of whom saw self-disclosure as a means of self-emancipation, the raising of consciousness among fellow un-closeted individuals and a means of raising awareness in the wider society.
[citation needed] In The God Delusion, anti-religion activist Richard Dawkins uses the term "consciousness raising" for several other things, explicitly describing these as analogous to the feminist case.