The New Petition Framework

We're currently developing our strategy for a community-wide petition to draw attention to the current trans health care crisis, and create a meaningful solution.

But how do we create a solution?

We believe it involves pooling the collective frustrations of the local (Vancouver) trans community and our immediate allies, and voicing those frustrations with our health care representatives, via a hybrid online+offline petition. Here's what we plan to do:

1. Create a short video presentation, posted on our YouTube account and our FaceBook Page, communicating the brief history and scale of the problem, and how to get involved in the petition. (We feel this will help to "standardize" the many aspects of the crisis for trans individuals' lack of access to care, and condense the concerns of our allies into action too. We're working on this right now.)

2. Create the actual petition form, and a personal letter-writing template; publish on VanTAG, circulate both online and offline with community contacts / groups.

3. Purchase a pre-paid year of a VOIP-like fax-to-email service; drawing donations from VanTAG founders, team members, close supporters, etc.

4. Ask our viewers to download the petition PDF, print it, sign it, and fax or scan+email it in to VanTAG.

5. Circulate the presentation and petition among community networks, involve the media via interviews and press releases, encourage discussion and blogging/vlogging.

6. Pool the results of the petition here on VanTAG, and report back to the community.

7. Utilize the petition and personal letters as the focal points for pressuring health care representatives to; fully recognize, insure, fund all surgeries/services, deliver wherever necessary -- competent, individualized, holistic, community-based trans health care.

8. If necessary, reassert the results of the petition as the foundation for our campaign media releases and physical protests in both Vancouver and Victoria.

If we [at VanTAG] hypothetically receive 1000 petition signatures, and we've made every effort to facilitate relief from the current crisis with the Ministry of Health, MSP, VCH et al. by talking with respective health care representatives, but we [the community] don't receive an adequate reply in the form of full funding and delivery, we [the community] will be fully legitimized in our physical protests.

While we appreciate that faxes are rapidly becoming endangered, the rationale behind our old-tech approach is relatively straightforward: we believe physical signatures will enable the petition to speak on behalf of the collective community and legitimize our protests. Signatures are as powerful as appearing in person (which can't be said for email addresses) and they bring significantly more weight to the proverbial bargaining table when communicating with health care representatives. We're essentially trying to avoid the pitfalls typically associated with internet petition slacktivism.

We're struggling to create the seed cash for the fax-to email service. If you happen to be interested in helping us with this aspect of the petition, please contact us via email at vantagblog@gmail.com and share your ideas with us! (Please note, this is not a solicitation for donations.)

If you have any questions about or new strategy, please post your Q&A via the askablogr widget on the sidebar of this blog. If you have any general feedback, please don't hesitate to comment! Thanks.

- The VanTAG Team