29/02/2020 - A Rare Day, Arrayed
February has been and gone!
At the beginning of the year, we sat down to strategise about the direction of the GP Living Library to figure out what direction it was going to go. This week marks four months since its conception, and the function of the Library had undergone a few evolutions since Louise first approached me to manage the project, so we had to touch base to figure out how we were going to measure the success of the project.
Our social media have been expanding almost faster than we can keep up, so we know we’re keeping up to date on everybody’s projects, and everybody seems to be keeping up to date on us! If you haven’t already, you can find us on Twitter @gplivinglibrary or join our private Facebook group (or, for our non-GP members you can always follow the public-facing Facebook page), and we always welcome emails to gplivinglibrary@gmail.com if you have a project you’d like us to promote.
Our goals for March are to find a more stable, sustainable way to fund this Living Library. While we’ve been trying to get our foundations settled we haven’t been able to focus on expanding into GP Peer Support as much as we’d like, but as the project expands it will become more financially viable to finally support community mentoring. This has been a unique passion project and we’re really excited about how rapidly it’s expanded, so we’re hoping that with a little brainstorming we might be able to find a way to keep this resource free and accessible while still giving me a leg-up to actually expand the Library!
GP Advocacy, Expanded
February was the month that we opened up the GP Living Library Logbook. We set a goal for ourselves to publish one original piece per week, to foster a more open and interactive culture within the project.
Our human books absolutely smashed through this goal, with 12 pieces published by our Human Books within the month! Given that we are not a news media outlet, achieving an average of 3 pieces per week from volunteer contributors is absolutely to be celebrated, especially considering the impostor syndrome that many of our Human Books struggle with.
I am so proud of and grateful to each and every one of our contributors for helping us foster a community dialogue that is transparent and open to the public. Each piece detailing a GP’s lived experience or a passion for advocacy contributes to the depth of understanding and sympathy for GPs in the public eye, re-empowering this slice of the medical community to speak and be heard.
We now have 24 Human Books on our shelves!
New Human Books
Breaking it down…
We’re averaging about 8 new Human Book draft bios per month, with about half of them ending up being published. We always always always double check with our Human Books that they’re happy with their bios before we publish them, so if you’ve filled in the form but you can’t find your profile, send me an email! Your draft bio may have filed itself away behind the couch cushions in your inbox, so I’m happy to send you another one. You’ll see from the chart below you’re not alone in my drafts folder, and I’ll be happy to hear from you!
Welcome to all our newest Human Books
Click through the images below to discover all the Human Books we’ve been privileged to add to our shelves over the past few months. We are so lucky to be able to present such a diverse range of experiences in this collection, including some truly prolific cultural mainstays of the general practice world.
