by CJ Williams
When organizing to get the actual facts on your local community health centers, one strategy we’ve used is the Research Party.
In New England, we gathered twice in conveniently local cafes with phones and laptops, where we pinpointed all health centers, mapped distances, and made phone calls. To confirm the information we had gleaned from our mobile get-together, we then carpooled or walked to nearby locations to check in-person if our data were correct.
The event is fun — it’s community building. It’s easy to add info quickly and smoothly to a joint google document, and share with everyone involved or in the region, and easy to cover a lot of ground fast and effectively when carpooling or walking together. An added benefit to this rubric for research is that everyone involved gets a feel for distances, ease of access, and other details necessary to mapping alternatives to Planned Parenthood in this project.
Using the google document also makes filling out the website’s Google Form easy, and it’s a simple thing to plug in additional notes on Planned Parenthood’s policies and hours in the area as well.
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This blog of the Grassroots Defunding: Finding Alternatives to Planned Parenthood campaign is for activists to share their stories, so we can learn what’s worked well, what hasn’t worked well, what lessons have been learned, and get more ideas for local actions.
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