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WANT TO LEND A HAND?
For much of its existence, Health Care for Everyone – Alabama has been guided by a very small number of individuals. We’ve reached the point now where we can broaden the opportunities for people to participate.
Opportunities for everyone. We’re gaining new members. Some just want to know what’s going on, or to lend moral support to our cause. For anyone who’d just like to be on our e-mail list, sign on E-mail list
Steering Committees: Health Care For Everyone – Alabama is developing a set of steering committees, meeting every couple of months, to kick ideas around about where we’re going, what we ought to be doing, how to do it better. Eventually, ongoing leadership of the organization will evolve from steering committee activists.
We speak of committees, for as the organization gains strength in areas outside of Birmingham…as people interested in functioning on steering committees emerge… the state coordinator will visit with activists in those areas periodically, as well. To indicate interest in participating on a steering committee, please indicate here.
Speakers Bureau: The heart of getting our message out has always been presentations by speakers, with or without PowerPoint support, to any audience who’s interested. Central to this activity, of course, are people willing to be speakers. (Count me in)
Speaking needs groundwork. We need field organizers...people willing to make the contacts (usually in person or by phone) to secure invitations for speakers to speak. (I can do that). And it never hurts to send out brief press releases to local media to give some publicity to the presentations(Sounds like something I can do).
While there are extensive PowerPoint slide shows available from our national organization (www.PNHP.org; ask the state coordinator for the password to the slides), and while other organizations have slides that can be useful (see resources in the Background Materiel section of this site), a talk always works best when it’s tailored to the audience that will hear it. Our web page will have some tailor-made PowerPoint shows quite soon, but contact the state coordinator if you’d like help preparing a presentation, or just to talk over your ideas of what you’d like to say.
Letters to the editor; Op-ed pieces. Anyone passionate about health-care subjects is welcome to fire off letters to the editor or op-ed pieces. Those who really enjoy writing should have a fund of information to draw on from the web site; we can send along any special briefings that come from our national to anyone interested. (That’s me) The cautions: (1) check newspaper limits on number of words and other submission rules carefully before you write; (2) contact the newspaper in person to discuss planned op-ed pieces before setting pen to paper; (3) write about issues, not people, and be constructive or educational; (4) it goes without saying that one must resist any temptation to submit the work of others as if you’d written it; (5) realize that papers prefer to publish letters from people in their area but are open to excellent letters from anywhere, and (6) if you choose to represent yourself as a spokesman for Health Care for Everyone – Alabama, take extra pains to be sure that your position and the organization’s position are the same; we can review your proposed letter quite quickly. Then don’t be surprised if your letter doesn’t appear in print…most papers receive many more letters than they can publish.
Special Projects: Candlelight vigils for SCHIP, a march for Cover the Uninsured week, letter writing campaigns to Congressmen or to people who might become members of our organization…the list of possibilities goes on and on. Opportunities for special projects pop up from time to time. Usually the central need of a project is someone to be a leader. Often many other will join in when the ball starts rolling, but finding that first person is often like pulling hens’ teeth. If you think you’d might maybe be willing to start some project sometime, if you’re someone we could contact just to discuss the possibility that you could start a project, please let us know.
Our web page. Ideas for a web page for Health Care for Everyone – Alabama have been incubating for some time. Here’s where they stand at the moment.
Web page construction isn’t a problem. One of us has a family member who whose profession is the design and construction of web pages.
Web page content is more challenging. Why would someone want to visit our site to begin with? How can a search engine be encouraged to list us early when someone is doing a search? And what would make someone want to come back to visit our page again and again? What's going to make us valuable and unique?
Seems to me we want content…intelligent, fact based content, like links to articles in the New England Journal of Medicine, or Health Affairs. Medical journal articles that the average layperson wouldn’t have easy access to. Policy journal articles that the average physician would miss. (Incidentally, if you know of articles like those that we ought to include, please contact the coordinator.)
Might have unique pages (and sub-pages, and sub-sub pages) dealing with individual subject areas like SCHIP, and Veteran’s Health, and Mental Health Parity, and so on, though all linked by the common thread of increasing access to health care.
Each subject page should have links to other web pages with similar interests. With all the web sites that exist, we have the opportunity to be choosy, listing sites that are particularly interesting or informative. Again, the linked sites should have such merit that they’d help entice people to come back to our site. Keep in mind that one criterion search engines use, when ranking web pages, is linkages to other sites.
And each subject page should have its own set of PowerPoint slides, slide sets keyed to specific audiences.
It follows, then, that we need editors for each subject page, researchers of articles of interest for each subject, internet researchers seeking really good pages to link to (and sites that might be willing to reciprocate by publishing a link to our site), speakers willing to talk about each subject, advance people willing to line up speaking engagements…and quality control people constantly testing our web site for accuracy and freedom from bugs. If any of these assignments appeal to you, please click on the interesting word.
Finally, there are examples of successful organizations that make extensive use of the web in guiding their success.. MoveOn.org (and MoveOn.org Political Action) and the Barack Obama sites are generally recognized as examples of outstanding uses of the web, though there are many others, too. It takes far more than the single person now dealing with the web to learn from the ideas of successful web sites and put them to use. We’d welcome with open arms anyone interested in expanding what we’re doing. Please let us know if you’re willing to help. (call on me).
Revised January 19, 2009
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