2008-02: Creating Change- Sara Jaye Sanford

Saturday at Creating Change

2008-02-09T16:45:00.000-08:00

Today really gave me a chance to feel reinvigorated and inspired around why I am a health activist in the first place. In our movement, health is such a powerful and concrete issue and the people working on it all have such wonderful energy and commitment. I attended the two-session-long LGBT health workshop, and while I was looking forward to it, I definitely expected something so long to drag a little. It was totally inspiring and energizing. I can't wait to help more with the planning of the Bi and LBT health summits, and of course continue to try to get my job to send be to the Trans health summit. Heck, if I had the time and the money I'd go to the gay men's health summit too! Chris Bartlett is such a positive person and a great model for how some traditionally more privileged factors of our community can work in solidarity with the rest of us. Besides, he made it sound like so much fun.

One thing that I have learned here is more about the importance of data...While this is definitely something I understood before, it didn't strike me as quite so compelling. We need to know what's going on in our communities in a way that translates to funders and to the government, and moreover, we deserve to be included in all of the tools they use to count citizens and measure our health!

I really need to start thinking very hard and very specifically about where I want to go with all this in my graduate education...but that is a task for another day.

Seriously, Three Billion Dollars.

2008-02-08T20:52:00.000-08:00

Today was a really big tobacco day at Creating Change! It's great to get a chance to meet others doing local work throughout the country and who are really engaging their communities in this issue.

Whether you like it or not, money really does dictate a lot of what we do - and the fact that there is a lot of money being made available for LGBT tobacco work is a doubly good thing if it calls the attention of more folks and organizations to this issue. It's just odd because so often, as a minority community, we work so hard to articulate what our issues are and to bring about awareness and understanding in mainstream communities, with so few resources - often part of the argument being that we need more resources! And in a few cases, with tobacco, the money is there- and it's OUR community that needs to raise its awareness level. This is something that really motivates me to find ways to talk about this and help LGBT people understand what a serious problem it is. It's so socially acceptable that often, I'm afraid people have a hard time understanding how very real and how very tragic the consequences of our tobacco are (hate to simplify it like this, but it's almost an "if everybody's doing it, it must be okay" kind of mentality - we need to move beyond that!). I like to think I've read through quite a few numbers on this, but even I was shocked when Scout announced at the American Legacy Foundation's reception that the LGBT community spends $3 BILLION a year on tobacco products - compared to $60 million on LGBT issues/organizations. Staggering.

In any case, I will have a lot to do when I get home! I want to do some research to decide if it's worth planning any kind of one-off or drop-in cessation programming, talk with the boss woman about meeting up with our mayor's office on LGBT issues about adding SO questions onto DC's health surveillance instruments, and much more. I know it's going to take a little while to plow through all of the information I'm getting here and to look up everything I've made notes to. But right now I'm pretty done for today! I'm just hoping this post makes sense and is largely grammatically correct.

Welcome!

2008-02-07T20:43:00.000-08:00

Today was my first day at my first Creating Change, and I'm told I'm in for quite an experience! At the moment, I can certainly say that it is a testimony to the energy here that I made it through the day in one piece without any coffee;)

I've been thinking a lot about something that Mara Keisling said during today's institute on trans health care - it really resonated with what guides my own thinking about health care in our country. She emphasized that health care is something no human being should have to compromise on, so that "as we try to get into the system, we need to make sure it's a system worth getting into." Food for thought!

I'm really grateful to the National LGBT Tobacco Control Network for bringing me here! Tomorrow is going to be a very full day, especially on the tobacco control front.