As you might have heard, WEGO Health held our first-ever Health Activist Meetup last week here in our hometown of Boston, MA! We love bringing Health Activists together online, but as part of our ongoing mission to empower all of you to help others, we wanted to offer a different type of connection – a chance to meet your fellow Health Activists face-to-face. We were thrilled to meet so many local Health Activists, and delighted to have one of your join us all the way from Atlanta! (Thanks Phyllis!)
Our goal for the Meetup was to give everyone a chance to dig in to some of the nitty-gritty details of being a Health Activist, so we created a few “break-out sessions” to let everyone connect and discuss the subjects that mattered most to them. We’ll be posting some notes from those sessions in the next few days (along with key takeaways and posts provided by our fabulous facilitators), but here’s a quick look at what we talked about:
- The Road to Activism: How to Transform Your Passion into Activism with Laurie Edwards, from A Chronic Dose, a blog about chronic illness, healthcare, and writing
- Expanding Your Reach: How to Attract More Readers or Followers with WEGO Health CEO Jack Barrette
- How to Connect Offline and Online Activism with Alicia Staley, founding director of the Staley Foundation and Awesome Cancer Survivor
Laurie, Jack, and Alicia were great session leaders and everyone had a lot to share, but the highlight for us was seeing the connections that were made between Health Activists from a wide range of health passions and conditions.
We know that Health Activists aren’t always aware of the unique and important role they play within the online health community, so we were thrilled to have the opportunity to celebrate all of you and the great work that you do. We hope that being together in one place invigorated everyone and opened the doors for new ideas on collaboration, future events, and other ways Health Activists can continue to work together.
All in all, we felt our first-ever Health Activist Meetup was a great success. We had the amazing opportunity to meet some of you in person and it’s only made it clear to us that we want more!
So what’s next? Watch for Health Activist Meetups in your area and let us know where to Meetup next! For those of you who weren’t able to make this one, we hope you’ll come to the next one. If you were there, we hope you’ll share your experience with others – write a blog post and leave a link to it in the comments!
It was an amazing event – I'm writing up our group's notes on "expanding your health activist reach" and I'll get those posted pronto.
I will never forget the visit to Boston where I attened the Health Activist Meetup. It was a great networking opportunity and I left with tools to help me broaden my reach in the sickle cell community. Support is a wonderful thing and I look forward to partnerships with those in attendance. I would like to get pictures of the event from anyone who has them. My pictures came out too dark because the flash was not on.
Thank you so much for hosting this great event – I am so thankful that I was able to attend. I left feeling inspired and empowered. The night was a huge success! 🙂