On Advocacy, Community & the Fight for Justice

When you both first imagined AdvocacyCon, what did you feel was missing that you wanted to create other than the obvious space for families to come together and find hope? Is there more that you wanted to kind of add to that plate that was missing in what you were experiencing?

The first thing I wanted was community.

I wanted to build a community where a family can go into the room and feel like, oh, my God, finally, somebody gets it.

Finally, somebody understands what I'm going through.

But the other part of it I think was really important was to make sure that there were resources, there were experts, there were nonprofit organizations, people who know how to work these cases, private investigators.

So that if a family does have a question for an attorney, there's an attorney there to answer some of those questions for them.

If a family needs help, there's organizations like Angels Voices, Silence No More, like Season of Justice, like other organizations that are out there trying to help families meet them there.

So I think aside from having that community and having access to resources was really important, having access to speakers was really important.

Making sure that the content creators that have exhibits in our exhibitor hall And because they're going to tell some of these families stories, not because it's the most famous true crime person you've ever seen on TV and you get to get their autograph.

Like that's not why content creators are invited.

So it is very different from a traditional podcast conference, true crime conference in the sense that if you're not here to help families, then you're welcome to attend and you're welcome to learn how to help the families.

But we're probably not going to give you a table.

Yeah, I guess I kind of forgot to ask the question at its core, what is AdvocacyCon? And you've already kind of answered some of this, but what is AdvocacyCon?

AdvocacyCon is a conference, not a convention.

It is a conference for families of the missing and murdered, for people who care about cases and want to help these families, for experts, for advocates, for resources to all come together.

I put in the chat, hope factory, hopefully generate hope for these families, right? I think the act of just not feeling alone is enough to create hope.

And then to see other cases that have made it through, like our first keynote speaker was Natalie Holloway's mom, Beth Holloway, which is a super famous case.

This year, we've got Gabby Petito's mom, Nicole Schmidt, people whose cases have some resolution after quite a lot of time or quite a lot of coverage to say, you know what? It is possible for me, maybe.

Maybe my case can be solved.

Maybe my loved one can be identified because there is an investigative genetic genealogy group here that I'm talking to and meeting for the first time, which I didn't even know that was a thing.

So I think at the end of the day, if I was going to call it anything, I think a hope factory is what I would call it.

We took two years to plan the first one.

We did not rush anything.

We thought through every detail.

And when I say every detail down to what do the coffee cups look like? Specifically because we wanted absolute no way to re-traumatize or cause harm to these families.