Some months ago I wrote an article Weaving Community where I likened building community to weaving. I employed this lovely metaphor of community as an "intricate tapestry". Here is what I did not say, weaving is REALLY hard and can be terribly frustrating. Threads get tangled and break and you make a LOT of mistakes that cause unwanted gaps and holes and imperfections in the final project. You start out with this lovely plan where you decide on the pattern and the length and width of the cloth. You have this wonderful vision in your head of how things are going to go and then you sit down at that loom and it all goes to h***. You find that you have to keep deciding which errors to fix and which ones you will pretend were a part of the original plan. Well, that too is a LOT like building community. You start out with all of these wonderful plans and intentions and then life happens.
This is a pic of my latest project which has been an absolute nightmare. Notice all the little knots? Those are where I had to keep going in after I had supposedly finished threading the loom to fix broken threads.
There has certainly been a whole lot of "life" happening lately. As a nation we continue to navigate a pandemic, made more severe by "leaders" who place their political aspirations above public health. We continue to wrestle with the myriad impacts of white supremacy and hetero-normativity as it manifests in our economy, socio-political institutions, culture, and ultimately, our bodies. We continue to struggle against restrictive laws and policies that seek to control our ability to reproduce if, when, and under the conditions that we choose. NSRH, like many non-profit organizations, has also had to overcome a number of challenges. A lot of the things that we thought would happen (programs that we would launch, events that we would hold…) needed to be put on hold in order to attend to… "life". Believe me when I say there were times when I just wanted to crawl under the covers and hide from all the "life" going on. But then I would see some article about what nurses and other medical professionals were going through out in the field and I knew that, if you all could do it, if you could continue to show up even when our policies and institutions failed to keep you safe; I could certainly keep showing up for you. You are what kept us going. The good news is that we have come out on the other side stronger, more focused, and better organized. We want to be the best that we can be so that we can better serve you.
This has been a tough year and a very busy and fruitful year for us, and finally, yes finally! we are gearing up to launch our Membership Program to the larger community THIS month! I know I said that it was supposed to happen in March, but… "life" happened. In November 2020 we were able to successfully launch our pilot Membership Program and recruited 68 amazing Founding Members, which has allowed us to test various elements of our Membership Program in preparation for the full launch. In addition to this pilot launch we also:
- Received accreditation through the California Board of Nursing to provide continuing education (CE) credits/ contact hours for our content. YAAAAAH! This was an incredibly heavy lift for us and the process took about half a year.
- Completed a series of beautiful interactive SRH Education modules, which are available to our Members. Check out this sample course from our SRH & Nursing module.
- Created our own private and secure social Network, NSRH Social Hub, which is only accessible to our Members (think early Face book sans the Zuckerburg shenanigans).
- Continued to grow our Team in order to better serve our community. We went from 4 staff at the beginning of the year, to 3, to 2, to 4, to 5, and now 6! (Plus 3 amazing Assistants).
- Implemented a monthly Members Only Newsletter
- Launched our Karen Edlund Future Nurse Leaders Fellowship
While things did not work out quite as we had originally planned, we have managed to produce something beautiful. Is it imperfect?... Yes. Are there holes and flaws?... Most definitely yes, however, we are still weaving!
This is a pic of my last and largest project thus far. It turned out nice but it was a nightmare to make and I literally changed up the pattern midway through because I figured out that I did not like the initial pattern that I designed, which is why the one pattern transitions to a different pattern.
