bfcanada The Barrier Free Canada March 2015 newsletter
Table of contents
1. Introduction.
2. What have we been up to?
3. Building support.
4. Contact us.
1. Introduction
Dear readers:
Welcome to our first newsletter since the launch of our official website at http://www.barrierfreecanada.org. We launched our website in February and since then we have been extremely busy trying to keep up with inquiries and continuing to tweak our website based on feedback from our friends and visitors.
We’d like to start by introducing our committee:
Donna Jodhan chair person.
David Lepofsky of the AODA Alliance.
Jutta Treviranus of the inclusive design research centre.
Marc Workman of CNIB.
Steven Christianson of March of Dimes Canada.
Robert Pearson of Accessible Media Inc.
Our founding supporting organizations include:
CNIB, March of Dimes Canada, the MS Society, and the Canadian Hearing Society. We have recently picked up support from Accessible Media Inc.
2. What have we been up to?
In addition to launching our website, we have initiated our social media presence on Facebook and Twitter and we have been busy posting and tweeting. Our followers are growing steadily and people are beginning to share, like, and retweet our posts and tweets.
We recently emailed personal invitations to over 166 individuals asking them to join our list of supporters and we are pleased to report that the response has been quite good. You can share our tweets and Facebook posts by visiting us at http://www.barrierfreecanada.org and clicking on any of the Google, Twitter, or Facebook links towards the bottom of our home page.
In late January we mailed letters to the three Federal Party leaders asking for a meeting with someone in their party to discuss our initiative and to request that they give serious consideration to our initiative. We are hoping that we can convince all three Federal Parties to make someone available to us so that we can discuss working with them to enact legislation for a Canadian Disabilities Act.
We are going to continue our social media push for the next while along with publicizing our website and we will be developing some communications strategies in the coming weeks in order to expand our support.
3. Building support
We all know that one of the best ways to build support is through the grass root method. By word of mouth and through the circulation of emails. It is probably the best way to spread the word and you can help us by doing just that.
You can visit our home page at http://www.barrierfreecanada.org and click on the support us link. You will be presented with a choice of either supporting us by completing a form or contacting us directly by sending your email to info@barrierfreecanada.org. In addition you will be presented with an option on the form to either have your name published on our website as one of our supporters or you may choose not to do so.
4. Contact us
You may contact us via email at info@barrierfreecanada.org and someone will respond to you as soon as possible.
With best wishes
The Barrier Free Canada Committee