making activism more accessible in montreal – a callout!

Hey you! Rad Montreal activists! 

Do you wish you could make more of your group’s events physically
accessible? 

In the process of planning an event, does your group end up
compromising physical accessibility in favour of keeping costs
down?

Do you wish you could provide more detailed information about
accessibility on event promo? 

Making our events accessible to people with physical disabilities
is just as important as making them affordable/free, queer and
trans-positive, and anti-racist. As Montreal activists, we can pool
our resources to come up with information on accessible venues.

In response to the general dearth of collective information on
accessible venues in Montreal, The 2110 Centre and the Union For
Gender Empowerment are teaming up to put together an info-sheet about
planning accessible events. 

There are two ways to get involved:

The first is: Planning meetings!
The first purpose of this call-out is to gather a group of folks from
different orgs who are into attending a couple of planning meetings
during which we will solidify the info-sheet outline, as well as come up
with an action plan to coordinate venue excursions to gather detailed specs -
measurements, transportation info, ramps, chairs, etc. It would be lovely
if you could distribute this call-out out far and wide, and to anyone else
you know who is interested in helping make activism more accessible in
Montreal. This is a community-wide project – it would be so incredibly
awesome to see involvement from variety of orgs working on different
struggles!

The first meeting will be the week of February 1st, in about two weeks. If
you’re excited about helping organize, please fill out this doodle**, so we
can pick convenient meeting time: http://www.doodle.com/tpwsahtvq98eapzi.
To fill it out, click on the link, fill in your name, and check the boxes
corresponding to the time slots during which you are available to meet. 

The first meeting will either be in the 2110 Centre (2110 Rue Mackay) or
Union For Gender Empowerment (4th Floor of the SSMU building at McGill,
Room 431 – 3480 Rue McTavish) Details TBA!
(**The Doodle website doesn’t always work well with audio electronic text
or screen reader technology. Please contact me if you would like to
participate but your reading software isn’t compatible.)

2. Venue Visits!
 If you don’t think you’re up for helping organize, you can still help gather
information by signing up to visit venues! The majority of the work of the
project is contained in these sessions. We’ll help you set up the appointment
with the venue, and provide the questionnaire/outline of information to gather.
You can either sign up as a group or as individuals. You can sign up for just
one, a few, or many visits. Each excursion should take about an hour,
depending on the venue. 

Venue visit sign up will be coming to inboxes in the next few weeks!
The purpose of this project is to provide rad groups witheasy-to-access
info about the venues in which they hold their events, so they can put it
on event promo, and generally be more informed about venues and accessibility
in Montreal. Please email accessibilityproject@gmail.com
if you have any questions,
comments, concerns, love, etc!

In solidarity,
Zoe Page
The 2110 Centre for Gender Advocacy
The Union For Gender Empowerment

PS Here’s the doodle link again: http://www.doodle.com/tpwsahtvq98eapzi