Hitting up Gay Doctors!

[Kara Desiderio]

Hi all,

I loved Judy's suggestion last night of searching the area's gay providers and reaching out to them for donations.  I searched GLMA (Gay and Lesbian Medical Association) and found 118 providers in the Bay Area and 256 providers in the state of California. 

I'd like to suggest (and with all my utmost respect to Nikki for planning the helloutta canvassing), I wonder if it would bring us in more money if we put the Stanford students to work on calling the lists of providers instead of hitting the pavement?  Thoughts?  Nikki - what do you think?

It also happens to be National LGBT Health Awareness Week could be a great point of information to include in our calling script and might provide further incentive to give. 

kara

[Melyssa Mendoza]

agreed re judy's suggestion! and yes, a big thank you to nikki for organizing canvassing.

 

i think it's a good idea for the students to phone bank to those providers with a script instead of canvassing. however, if it's on the weekend, i'm guessing you have their office numbers, and that the calls will just be leaving messages. are the students available during the day on a week day?

 

do the doctors you found also include mental health peeps? have we reached out to http://sites.google.com/site/sftherapycollective/? sorry if we have already. :)

 

thanks,

melyssa

[Nikki]

Kara,

As I've said, I'd do anything reasonble to bring dollars to the cause
and it would be fine with me to put the Stanford students to work on
contacting GLMA providers. I see only one possible problem with it
about which I might be mistaken. We would be doing this on a Saturday
afternoon and I would doubt that many medical providers are hanging
out in their offices on a weekend afternoon. If your data base has
their home numbers, that's a different story and by all means we
should phone them. If you feel that it's likely that we can contact a
good majority of them at the numbers you have on the list on Saturday,
by all means let's go for it. Another idea would be to split the
students to cover 2 bases (one group calling the providers and a
smaller group mass emailing the providers that we can't reach by phone
due to their weekend absence). Just another twist on the concept. One
other twist would be to see if we can get some students and volunteers
to also do this on a weekday in order to catch them in their offices.
I'm game for anything that brings in larger amounts of money at this
point including bootlegging, etc, etc. Thus if you feel that we could
fare better monetarily using our time phonebanking providers on
Saturday, let's do it.

Thanks for following up on Judy's suggestion,
Nikki

[Kara Desiderio]

The GLMA list is inclusive of mental health providers and as far as I know, we haven't reached out to SF Therapy Collective.  They are a small start-up that happened in response to New Leaf closing and from my brief stint as a client there my sense was that they are pulling it together on a shoestring. 

Jackson has a working relationship with Chris Holleran, a therapist there and a founding member.  Jackson - what do you think about asking him and feeling out if they could contribute?

Ok - back to GLMA phonebanking.  All we have is office numbers, it's true.  And so I agree with concerns about calling on the weekends.  Nikki - I like some of your ideas - I'm gonna default to you to how you think we should make the day happen.

k

[Mitchel Hawkins]

Do we know anyone at GLMA? Could we see if they'd make an ask for Lyon-Martin? I agree with the concerns about actually reaching any of these doctors (on a weekday or weekend) on the phone. Do you have email/mailing addresses?

While we're on the topic of gay doctors: What about Bay Area Physicians for Human Rights www.baphr.org? They are a local gay doctor group. As far as I can tell all they do is give money away and host happy hours. I'll send an email to the one person I know there. I'm supposed to be going to some gay thing of their's Saturday night, will let you know what I find out.

[Pike On A Bike]

Hey mitchel, baypahr is already one of our donors. They might be worth reapproaching though!

[Nikki]

You got me there Kara as I'm not certain about how to play it on Saturday. A cluster of large donations is very tempting and would obviously be a good use of our time and volunteers.The possibility that we might not connect with many or any of the providers on a weekend afternoon is lurking in back of my mind which if true, would not be a good use of time. Do we have the providers email addresses? On the flip side bringing in small change with the help of our students through canvassing and hitting tattoo parlors would at least bring in something. So it's a tough one to call one way or another.

Do you think it would be remotely possible to hold a phone bank activity on any weekday this week right after or before working hours (which might also not be the best time to reach medical providers) but possibly better than a weekend since I feel strongly that we should not pass this cluster of potential donors up in the very near term. Perhaps we can phone bank instead of our meeting on Wednesday?

I've been thinking this through since Kara posed the idea and have been going back and forth about it all day. The need for large sums pull me toward trying to contact the GLMA providers on Saturday and my common sense is causing me to lean toward going with what we know about pulling in small potatoes on Saturday. At least small potatoes are better than none.
I apologize for not being more definitive but its a tough decision since both activities have merits and downsides.

What do you'll have to say about which direction to go on Saturday since we are dealing with the unknown obstacle of trying to contact medical providers on a weekend? If I had to choose what's probably best this minute, I'd say canvassing. But I want to hear the opinions of others and go with our collective wisdom given the back and forth thoughts I just laid out.

Thank you all for reading this long list of thoughts and please let me hear yours so that we can come to a decision and go with it.
Nikki

[chvaza]

at the risk of just muddying the waters, I'm wondering if it would be useful to ask the Standford students to brainstorm their own connections?  Can we use them to connect us to other communities we haven't reached?  Maybe we should check with them to see if they have direct connections to potential donors that they could reach on Saturday on LM's behalf? c . --- On Thu, 3/24/11, Nikki <fila...@gmail.com> wrote:

[pike on a bike]

I actually really like this idea, though it sort of bleeds back into the concept of the FirstGiving- style individual donations. Maybe we can have some kind of hybrid thing...

--
Do you believe that access to health care is a right, not a privilege? Support our local women's and transgender clinic, Lyon-Martin, to ensure that they will be able to provide health care to our community for many years to come. Please visit www.savelyonmartin.org for more info!

[sabrina a]

I think the Stanford students should be given some monetary goals ($1000 each?) for the weekend? Make it a competition maybe. They are med students at Stanford. I think we should take advantage of their competitive streak (and ability to fundraise).

---

Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2011 12:53:13 -0700
Subject: Hitting up Gay Doctors!
From: karan...@gmail.com
To: save-lyon-martin-fund...@googlegroups.com

[Cheryl Valenzuela]

I like sabrina's idea

Sent from my iPod

On Mar 25, 2011, at 12:33 AM, sabrina a <sabri...@hotmail.com> wrote:

> I think the Stanford students should be given some monetary goals ($1000 each?) for the weekend? Make it a competition maybe. They are med students at Stanford. I think we should take advantage of their competitive streak (and ability to fundraise).
>

[Kara Desiderio]

There aren't emails listed, just names, specialties, addresses and phone numbers.

[Nikki]

Hello ALL and THANKS for all of your diverse INPUT.

Since the decision is left to me, here is what I think is the best path to take given all the variables and circumstances with which we are dealing.

THE VARIABLES: It's probably going to be raining tomorrow morning but it should end around the noon hour. I'm concerned about the possibility of coming up dry with doing a phone bank outreach to the GMLA providers on a Saturday afternoon. We want to show some monetary return for our time and effort. Door to door canvassing would bring in a much smaller sum than IF we were able to make contact with a reasonable percentage of GMLA providers. It's the "if" in the sentence above the concerns me and drives my decision.

Thus I feel that we should proceed with the door to door neighborhood canvass as planned along with one (possibly two) subgroups hitting up tattoo parlors (suggestion made to me by Sabrina) in the Haight, on Market and any other close in locations. I'm also considering two possible parallel paths. [[{I swear to you that I'm not trying to make this complex}]]. Anyhow I can come in early if Kara and maybe one other volunteer can also do so in order to quickly call a small random sample of 10-12 GMLA providers to see if we can actually make contact with a reasonable number (about 25-35%) of these providers. If we are able to make contact with that approximate percentage, we can then decide to go with the phone banking. Also if by chance and bad luck, it is going to continue raining beyond what I'm forecasting, we should probably proceed with the phone bank and see how it goes with or without taking a random sample. If it turns out to be a bust after a good number of calls, we can head out to canvass rain or shine.

I hope that this plan is agreeable to all or at least the great majority of you and I ask you to come with an open mind, prepared to go in either direction and tote your rain gear just in case. I'll contact Charles to recommend that his group bring their rain gear.

My one outstanding question is, can you Kara and possibly one other person volunteer to come about 30-40 minutes early (say about 11:20 -11:30) to phone the small random sample of GMLA providers? Please let me know.

I hope to see all of you tomorrow rain or shine,
Nikki

[Pike On A Bike]

Hey Nikki! I will be there as will my friend Santi, and of course we are both happy to do whatever is deemed best. One thing I've considered is that even if we leave nice voice messages, it is probably better in terms of prepping the doctors about our situation than simply cold calling them, especially considering how difficult it is to get an actual doc (not a secretary) on the phone even when s/he IS in the office.

Perhaps we can all do a little of each.

Thanks again for taking this on!

Pike

jackson bowman <jackson...@gmail.com> wrote:

>Not to speak for Kara, but I know that she has quite a bit of work to do
>tomorrow, and while she can probably be there early to open the clinic for
>us I don't think we should count on her being able to phone bank the GLMA
>docs with us.
>
>I will come in early to help call the docs, but then I will also probably
>leave a little early.
>
>Nikki, I will see you at the clinic at 11:20.
>
>Jackson

>
>On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 12:33 PM, Nikki <fila...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hello ALL and THANKS for all of your diverse INPUT.
>>
>> Since the decision is left to me, here is what I think is the best path to
>> take given all the variables and circumstances with which we are dealing.
>>

>> *THE VARIABLES*: It's probably going to be raining tomorrow morning but it

>> should end around the noon hour. I'm concerned about the possibility of
>> coming up dry with doing a phone bank outreach to the GMLA providers on a
>> Saturday afternoon. We want to show some monetary return for our time and

>> effort. Door to door canvassing would bring in a much smaller sum than *IF
>> * we were able to make contact with a reasonable percentage of GMLA

[Pike On A Bike]

I also love this idea. These kids know people with money who care about health! I will work on a good pep talk for tomorrow. Nikki, is there any way you can ask them to bring their laptops? Maybe we can / should have a little email party at the beginning (or a phone bank to their contacts).

See ya'll tomorrow!

Cheryl Valenzuela <chv...@yahoo.com> wrote:

>I like sabrina's idea
>
>Sent from my iPod
>
>On Mar 25, 2011, at 12:33 AM, sabrina a <sabri...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I think the Stanford students should be given some monetary goals ($1000 each?) for the weekend? Make it a competition maybe. They are med students at Stanford. I think we should take advantage of their competitive streak (and ability to fundraise).
>>
>> Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2011 12:53:13 -0700
>> Subject: Hitting up Gay Doctors!
>> From: karan...@gmail.com
>> To: save-lyon-martin-fund...@googlegroups.com
>>