Farewell to our Slack COVID-19 Support Group
As you may have heard, our COVID-19 Slack support group officially shut down on May 29, 2023. It is a devastating loss for the thousands of people across the globe who found emotional support, connection, information, advocacy and research opportunities, and so much more in our Slack space over the past three years.
In case you missed it, we announced a need for funding to sustain what had become significant operations in November of 2022. When we were unable to raise the funds necessary to sustain operations, we announced in April 2023 that we would be shutting down the support group. You can read more about these decisions in previous body type posts.
This means that when you log onto Slack, you will no longer see the Body Politic workspace. After collecting feedback from our community, we made the difficult decision to delete all data associated with the workspace. While we know the Slack group has served as a useful archive for many of us, our commitment has always been to the emotional wellbeing and privacy of our members. At the end of the day, we had to prioritize confidentiality, and the needs of our community members who were concerned about privacy issues should we attempt to maintain any type of archive of the former workspace. We know what a devastating loss this is to the Long COVID community, and we wish there had been another sustainable path forward that could account for every member’s distinct wants and needs.
Our Slack support group may not exist anymore, but there are still millions of people living with Long COVID who need (and deserve!) peer support and access to vetted information. We’ve updated our resource on recommended support groups, so that people living with Long COVID can more easily navigate this transition. This document is printable for folks who have limited screen-time tolerance, and breaks down the details of various support groups available — including information on subgroups available, size, ease of use, general descriptions and links that take you directly to the sign-up page for each group. We encourage you to peruse the options and find the groups that feel like the right fit for you. Click on the image to download a PDF with links embedded.
A one-page handout designed for print that lists support group options for Long COVID, vetted by the Body Politic team. Each group lists a description with subgroup, technological difficulty, and size noted and QR code images link to the sign-up page of each support group.
Lastly, a few former members of our team continue to consult on one of the support group options listed on that handout, New Health. You can stay up-to-date on their progress by signing up for their waitlist (which will sign you up for their newsletter) or following them on Instagram and Twitter.
We know this transition is not easy. We hope the resources we’ve provided will help you make an informed choice about where to reconvene and/or forge new connections in the Long COVID community. We hope to see you in one of these other spaces, and we also recognize that the world we built on Slack is in many ways irreplaceable. We are moving through this grief and uncertainty with you, while holding hope for our collective future and the new communities and connections we may build together.
In solidarity —
Body Politic