Welcome to our new website!
Just over two years ago, a group of teenagers were frustrated with the social support they weren’t receiving and were relying on themselves to provide. It felt like week after week the same people were hearing the same stories about delayed access to transition-related healthcare and challenges meeting other trans youth outside of a clinical context. From these frustrations came the idea that trans youth should be supporting each other, that we don’t need another cis person to facilitate discussions about our bodies and experiences. Thus, SAEFTY was created. When we first came up with the idea, we got a group together and met in any free space we could find while planning various things that we thought a youth group should do. We practiced sending professional emails, we created social media accounts, and we bought a domain: saeftyottawa.ca.
From there, we tried our best to maintain each of these accounts, but the website soon became an afterthought. At the time, most of the digital interest we received was coming from instagram and facebook, so why put so much effort into the website? But as our group started gaining traction, we realized that our website received a lot of traffic! Seeing the high traffic inspired us to redesign it into something that allowed us to do much more. This is when one of our facilitators took on the task of redesigning the site. We started by changing hosting platforms so we could have more flexibility with what we have on the website and make everything look better. Other things that popped up during the development of the new site include a blog and sharing of community resources. The new site can support these new pages with much more ease.
So, on behalf of the SAEFTY team, welcome to our new website! Take a look around. Check out the CHEO report tab to download a copy of the report we did on trans youth’s experience at CHEO. The Media page includes SAEFTY in the news, including an article about us being capital pride’s 2018 youth marshall and a podcast about our report on trans youth’s experiences in the CHEO gender diversity clinic. Check out the resources section for local community support. And finally, check back in here to see more blog posts from yours truly and other members of the trans community!