What’s Next at Body Politic: Transitioning our Support Group to a New Platform

We’ve got some big news about the future of Body Politic. If you’ve been following us on Twitter or have been active in our support group over the past year, you know that we’ve been struggling to adequately support this group for two years now; a shutdown has been on the horizon for many months. We’re grateful to finally have an update to share about the future of our organization.

First, the good news: We are excited to announce a tech and media partnership with New Health to be the next iteration of high quality peer support for people after Covid-19 infections. New Health is a brand new, well-funded app created by David Morales and Amir Mustefa, two people with chronic illnesses. David is a Covid-19 long-hauler who spent his first months with Long COVID in our support group. He and Amir know the importance of peer-support in chronic illness journeys and their mission is to strengthen existing groups like ours, because they believe community care *is* healthcare. 

New Health’s team has been consulting with members of Body Politic’s board to build out a virtual community that will aim to replace our Slack support group, providing us with the financial sustainability, privacy, and potential for customization that we have lacked on here and at other social media platforms. New Health will be hiring Body Politic moderators and board members as their first paid staff, and members of our community are currently testing their app. We’re really excited about the opportunity to take what we’ve learned over the past three years and shape a community from the ground-up. 

The difficult news is that, after many months of aggressive fundraising and strategizing, we are shutting down our original Slack support group on May 31. Last fall, we attempted to fundraise to secure our group for the long-term on Slack, and create the organizational staffing infrastructure necessary to support it into the future. While we weren’t able to meet our fundraising goal, we were able to buy ourselves the time to keep the support group alive while investigating other solutions — thanks in large part to many of our members’ generosity (donating, sharing our calls for donations, and connecting us with funders and potential partners). We also received feedback from our community during this time that we needed a more sustainable platform than Slack. 

While our support group shutdown would be happening regardless of our partnership with New Health, we’re extremely lucky to have been able to seize this opportunity, and we’re grateful to all of the members of our community who helped in various ways. New Health is a new, but well-funded technology company that shares our values around privacy, and will not charge members for entry into the community. We look forward to introducing our community to more of their team and product ideas in the coming months. 

Members of the Body Politic support group are testing the app and giving feedback to New Health so they can best meet our community’ needs. The app will be available to the Body Politic community this summer. If you are a member of our community and have not yet signed up to join us, please sign up here to be added to a waitlist. Please note that no information collected on these forms will be shared externally in any way, and that no data is being exported out of Slack into New Health, in order to respect the privacy and consent of our Slack support group members.

Over the past three years, Body Politic has functioned as much more than what most people think of when they imagine a “support group.” Through our community, Body Politic has been a powerful force of advocacy for Long COVID policies, including ensuring a CDC definition of Long COVID, linking community members to press and research opportunities, and incubating independent research and advocacy groups such as the Patient-led Research Collaborative and Long COVID SOS. After the Slack support group shutdown, Body Politic will continue to exist as an independent advocacy organization and New Health will work with us to amplify these sorts of community advocacy opportunities in our new online community. We’re also in the process of confirming a separate partnership with a non-profit organization to help sustain operations for our advocacy work. As we manage the logistics of this transition and settle into these new spaces, we recommend that members looking for immediate outlets for advocacy work check out our trusted partner, Long COVID Justice. More support and advocacy groups are also listed here.

While this transition is bittersweet for all of us, we are incredibly grateful for the work every member of our community has put into our current support group platform and we respect any decision our members make — to follow us to the New Health app or join other groups. It hasn’t been easy to make these decisions, but we are confident and hopeful about our future. This support group has been a lifeline for many of us as we know it has for you, and we look forward to continuing this important work with the operational support and funding it deserves. This group was created in 2020 as a crisis response, but in the past three years, it has evolved far beyond that. Long COVID is still an emergency, and we’re glad to finally be gaining the tools to truly support patients for the long-haul.