Inside AUREA - July 2022
Word count: 1444 words
Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
Written by the AUREA Team
Welcome to Inside AUREA - where we tell you all about what we’re getting up to. Today we’re discussing the following topics:
Hiatus
Non-profit plans
Team members and volunteers
Anti-oppression
Project progress
Website updates
HIATUS
We at the AUREA team will be taking a brief hiatus from the beginning of August until September 12. This is in part to allow ourselves to recharge and recover so we may continue to provide the best advocacy for the arospec community that we can. It is also to allow each of us time to focus on current projects or internal organizing that have not always received the attention we would want in favor of focusing on other projects.
During this time, we will be taking a break from our regular social media content, news feed, and other postings as well as taking on new projects or responding to outreach. Overall, we hope to use this hiatus as a moment to do what is necessary to ensure AUREA’s continued best quality in a sustainable manner.
NON-PROFIT PLANS
Back in April, we asked the community for their input on whether or not AUREA should become a non-profit and how. We explained our reasoning and potential paths in our article, To be or not to be: a non-profit?. With the input from our community accountability group and a few other aromantics, it is clear that becoming non-profit is in our future. Specifically, path 3 gained the most support. This entails a combination of registering as a non-profit and community fundraising. This is the most challenging of all paths, but it is a challenge we are willing to take on. There is a lot we need to prepare and establish before we can make this happen, so we ask for lots of patience. We will give updates as we go along, so make sure to check our next editions of Inside AUREA!
TEAM MEMBERS AND VOLUNTEERS
Since our last Inside AUREA in February, we’ve had a couple of changes in the team. We have a new Head of PR, Jordan, who brings to the table experience with public relations and anti-oppressive practices, and a new News Team member, Merlin, who is interested in writing issue-based and investigative pieces on issues that affect aromantics. We also now have a Designated Artist/Graphic Designer, Chance, who will help create content, such as posts and infographics. We’ve also said farewell to Faagun, our former Volunteer Coordinator, Sofia, our Organizational Outreach Manager, and Akweley Mazarae from the News Team who has returned to a contributor role.
We’ve recently created a couple of volunteer positions and have implemented a trial period so that new volunteers and team members do not need to feel they are committed long-term if they feel the work isn’t a good fit or they want to try things out before making long-term decisions. For example, we had a couple of captioners and article narrators join our volunteer team who have been making excellent progress!
We still are in need of more team members, especially if we want to become non-profit. If you’d like to volunteer, as either a team member or specialist volunteer, check out our volunteer page to see what we’re looking for. And if you think you can bring something to the team we haven’t thought of, please contact us!
ANTI-OPPRESSION
In April, the AUREA team participated in Food Solutions New England’s Racial Equity Habit Building Challenge. Each day of the 21-day challenge focused on an aspect of building knowledge and skills to confront inequity and be more involved in justice. Everyone who participated reported gaining a better understanding of the virulence of anti-Black racism and how AUREA may have contributed to it personally with individual team members but also organizationally.
For example, we recognized how our team representation could be replicating harmful organizational structures and mentalities, appropriating racism in a sense. We also learned how important it is to be specific about naming ourselves and the people we work with, rather than always using a broad othering category like “aros of color.” Finally, we incorporated organization evaluation rubrics into our own organizational self-assessments. We continue to work on planning how we can fairly and sustainably compensate people that work with us to unbar the barriers to entry for volunteering with us.
In May and June, we held our anti-oppressive organizational review. We also asked our community accountability group for their input and have been involving them more with our major decisions. Positive feedback from the group included good transparency and clear planning. It was identified that AUREA could do more for consistent accessibility of its web content and finances, as well as for working towards collective liberation.
AUREA will be checking that alt text is always available for linked images. Article narrations and closed captioning for written and audiovisual content are being added as new volunteers have joined the team! A 5-minute audiovisual presentation was also created by the Treasurer that is publicly available on the Donate and About pages for all to see how AUREA structures its finances. Finally, a policy regarding how we assess organizations we work with in the future is now available on our website under General Policies and at this link. AUREA hopes to include more diverse perspectives in its News Feed content as well as in the upcoming Census.
In the fall, a few members of the AUREA team intend to participate in Autistic Inclusion Workshops hosted by Asexual Outreach. These workshops will help the team understand how to make community spaces more accessible to autistic a-specs.
If you have any suggestions for anti-oppressive practices we can research, we’d love to hear about it.
PROJECT PROGRESS
AroUQ - We collaborated with the University of Queensland to conduct a qualitative study on aromantic experiences. Data collection was completed in January and the preliminary results were presented during the Aromantic Conference. At the moment, the researchers are writing up an article to submit for publication.
The book - As you may have noticed, we’ve been putting out forms and calls for quotes for us to include in the book. The book project team has been busy writing up the proposal, which we hope to submit in October. We had a few changes in volunteers with some stepping down and some joining, including a new book project coordinator to help keep things running smoothly!
Aromantic census - We were able to recruit more than 60 very talented volunteers from all over the world for the Aro Census 2022 Team! Our team is more diverse than the team which created the Aro Census 2020 and includes several BIPOC aros and aros from non-English dominant speaking countries. Our team members are functioning in different roles, including as question editors, question testers, translators and analysts.
Over the past few months, we were able to extensively edit the Census survey and added several new sets of questions, including about COVID-19, religion, race/ethnicity, racism and resilience, and trauma. So we hope to get more granular and inclusive in ascertaining the aro community’s experience.
Our translators are now working on translating the Census into different languages and our question testers will be providing feedback on the ease of completing the survey and other related matters. We hope to release the Census for the Aro public to complete in the last quarter of 2022!
We are still looking for more translators! Please feel free to apply to be a translator by contacting AUREA at contact@aromanticism.org with CENSUS TRANSLATOR in the subject line.
A census data request form was added to the website for researchers who wish to work with the data we collect from the Aro Census survey. You can find links to the form on our Contact, Projects, and Aro Census pages. The direct link is here.
WEBSITE UPDATES
AUREA has grown a lot since our founding and our website has grown with it. Our content has been expanded, our visitors diverse in both language and ability, among other things, and our website has not changed much.
During our hiatus, our web development team will be hard at work behind the scenes looking at tools to make our website more accessible and navigable. This will include condensing some of our information - like policies, team member information, and research guidelines - and highlighting on the things you care about most, like census results and community events.
As you browse our website in the coming weeks, please be prepared for things to be just a hair messy. Updates should be completed by the time the team returns from hiatus, and we’ll look forward to hearing your feedback on the new and improved look then!