By Stephanie Aines | Director of Organizing and Training
Right Care Gainesville has been busy over the past few months! They held several Town Halls throughout August and September focused on the many ways COVID is impacting their area. One Town Hall was led by pediatricians, and they discussed the many ways that our identities and social determinants of health impacts our COVID experiences. school reopenings - who makes the decisions about whether or not to open schools, and what facts and influences go into that decision. They had some heated conversations about how parents and teachers have not been involved in those decisions!
The Gainesville chapter has also been involved in voter outreach - registering community members and friends, and are now mobilizing to encourage and support early voting.
Right Care Nashville has officially kicked out! On their kickoff call on Sept 7, the chapter leaders explained their hopes and goals for the chapter, and broke into breakout groups to discuss. Their first project was to convince area beer and liquor distilleries to donate hand sanitizer to Nashville public schools. They planned to organize a longer campaign around this, but the distilleries immediately agreed!
Right Care DC held their first Open COVID Forum focused on the state of COVID in Montgomery County. RCA’s own co-founder and co-chair Shannon Brownlee moderated a panel including local city council members, organizers and teachers. They discussed their frustrations that covid test results were taking up to a month, how undocumented neighbors fear that getting tested could impact their immigration status, how black neighborhoods are those hardest hit by covid, and the experiences of local educators.
They organized a second Town Hall was in partnership with Progressive Maryland and the Montgomery County Education Association, and focused on the basics of covid prevention and testing. A panel of teachers spoke about the dangers of reopening schools too early. They led breakout groups where participants talked about their worries moving forward in terms of both school and community concerns about dealing with covid. These groups together are organizing a petition to demand that all residents of Maryland have access to health care, fight racism and white supremacy in state-wide healthcare and education institutions, increase widespread testing, contact tracing, and housing.
Our organizing continues! The RCA is training activists to gear up for a campaign fighting for COVID tests across the US! We are teaching faciltiators how to run group conversations, practicing recruitment skills, sending out surveys about different experiences with COVID tests across the country, and increasing our study groups to learn more about why this is such a problem.
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