WE MADE HISTORY with our Culturally Relevant & Anti-Racist Health Literacy App!
We’ve got amazing news! We’ve won second-place and $10,000 for the Engage Victoria’s Participatory Budgeting Grant for our Anti-Racist and Culturally-Competent Health Literacy app.
We want to THANK everyone who voted and shared our project in order to land us in SECOND-PLACE!
We have made HISTORY (Her-story!) with this win as being the VERY FIRST Black-and- Indigenous led organization to win a major PB grant! And all of our projects and programs are developed and led by BIPoC women.
But we ALMOST didn’t make it. At first, the voting committee decided NOT to move our project through to the voting stage, claiming that after a “thorough review” there are “already apps for seeing a doctor that supports newcomers/ESL groups” and that there was, “no non-profit supports identified to host the money, nor to support the project implementation.”
We respectfully replied, “We ARE a non-profit organization and we will be implementing the project.” We have never challenged a grant decision before, EVER. But we felt that the voting committee did not conduct a thorough review in order to understand the goals of our project proposal.
After fighting for our project, by researching the “existing” apps that they listed as alternatives and finding that they do NOT do what our app will do, which is:
Contain a list of culturally sensitive healthcare providers in Victoria with different specialities,
A list of Family Doctors accepting new patients,
Accessibility information for each healthcare provider (ie languages spoken, cost, insurance, etc),
A review and reporting feature where newcomers can praise excellent providers and easily report incidents of microaggressions, discrimination, sexism, or racism they may experience.
We’re glad we fought for our health app and landed in the voting round. Because the public has voted and now our health app project will become reality in 2021! Development has already begun. Stay tuned for more updates!
Through this process, we recognize even more how the lived realities of BIPOC women are constantly silenced. This project wouldn't have moved forward if we didn’t speak up and advocate for our community. Systemic racism exists as a barrier for racialized people to access quality healthcare services, on ALL levels. Even here, as we attempt to create a service to connect racialized newcomers and community to healthcare providers.
We made clear our disappointment in the voting process via a public letter which was issued on Dec. 21st, specifically the lack of understanding of healthcare access for racialized peoples in Victoria. This only reiterates the importance of our work.
Please help us celebrate this HUGE victory!
EXCITING NEWS! We are FINALISTS in this year’s ENGAGE VICTORIA Participatory Budgeting 2020 Grant.
SNIWWOC is dedicated to improving health outcomes for BIPOC. Part of SNIWWOC’s continued work in to support better health outcomes for racialized people and towards our goal of “increased transparency of incidents of racism in healthcare” is a proposed all-encompassing “Culturally-Competent and Anti-Racist Health Literacy App”.
It's the VERY FIRST of its kind. Picture Yelp, but with the ability to search, find and review local healthcare providers in different languages: English, French, Cantonese, Mandarin, Tagalog and Arabic and more.
As we know, newcomers, especially racialized people, face isolation as they try to settle into a new city. Language barriers exist, which makes access to healthcare even tougher.
We would be able to provide streamlined information for newcomers in multiple languages through our app, making it easy to access healthcare and report issues of racism, like common microaggressions, ex. making fun of someone’s accent or more serious issues like, treating their heath issues based on biased views.
Please vote for us. You’ll find our project in the over $2,000 stream, under the Healthcare tab, second down.
VOTE FOR US HERE!
Share with everyone you know. Voting open until November 6th.
You can also call the City of Victoria's Engagement department at 250-361-0210 to vote over the phone.
We’ve been involved in this work for a while now. Check out the timeline below for a summary of our work over the years: