Community Care Action Plan

at TTTM’s 2024 Annual Gathering

Thinking Through the Museum Community Care Action Plan

TTTM Team at the Ottawa Art Gallery (October 2024)

Organizers of TTTM’s 2024 Annual Gathering developed an Action Plan to encourage the group to embrace the notion of community care, and to reject black-and-white, perfectionist thinking regarding COVID risk mitigation.

Particularly given how COVID-19 negatively impacted our 2023 gathering, the 2024 organizers felt it was important to consider how TTTM’s intersectional values could be reflected in a plan for collective actions to keep us safer from illness.

Below is the complete version of our Action Plan. We encourage readers to use this as a resource or source of inspiration for their events, with the aim of better aligning our values of equity and inclusivity with everyday actions.

“... while I deeply understand the pull to “post-pandemic” life, I also have faith in collective love and the joys of co-creating collective safety. Pandemic safety practices don’t need to be all or nothing. We can refuse the normalization of disabled death in small but consistent ways. May we remember and re-embody the knowing that resisting abled supremacy is a love practice. Reducing community transmission in the spirit of collective responsibility is a love practice that is libratory to every bodymind where abledness is temporary.”

- ji-youn kim, March 2023 Instagram post (author of Practicing a Love Ethic in the Ongoing Pandemic).

Organizers of TTTM’s 2024 Annual Gathering encouraged the group to embrace the notion of community care, and to reject black-and-white, perfectionist thinking regarding COVID risk mitigation. Rather than rely on a single intervention (e.g. only vaccines or masking), we supported the use of a combination of protections to keep us as safe as possible as a group, while acknowledging individual challenges and choices. Below is a diagram of the “Swiss Cheese Model” (Roberts, 2020) that inspired our 2024 mitigation plans.

Team members chose when to mask (except in certain circumstances, see below), but were strongly encouraged to do so, and especially in poorly ventilated areas. We understand that masking can feel socially awkward, but we believe that normalizing masking is important! It directly combats the exclusion and erasure of disabled people from public spaces by making these spaces safer for everyone.

Swiss cheese model pandemic defense

Community Care Action Plan: Policies and Recommendations

This list of policies and recommendations was developed by Annal Gathering organizers and circulated to all travellers 4 months prior to travel.

Before you travel:

  • Read and come ready to participate in TTTM’s Community Care Action Plan.

  • Purchase a high-quality (KN95 or N95) mask to mitigate COVID risks while traveling.

  • Ensure your COVID vaccination is up-to-date.

  • For those traveling from outside of home countries: Ensure you have international health insurance. 

Do not travel if:

  1. You test positive for COVID-19. 

  2. You have COVID symptoms that are new or getting worse,


While traveling:

You are asked to:

  • Take a COVID rapid test each morning before gathering (TTTM provided 1 test/day for 4 days for each participant). [Required]

  • Wear a mask when participating in indoor activities (TTTM provided new masks for participants daily). [Strongly encouraged]

  • Assess your personal comfort level regarding joining the group for indoor/unmasked meals. We ask that team members be supportive of others’ differing risk tolerances. Meal deliveries were arranged and we circulated a pre-travel survey to assess attendee needs.  [Encouraged]

  • See “What if someone gets sick” section below for further actions you may be asked to take.

Meeting organizers:

  • Supply participants with four N95 masks and four rapid tests (1/day).

  • Monitor and keep everyone informed on positive COVID cases in our group.

What if someone gets sick?

  • If even one member of our group tests positive for COVID during our travels, all members who are medically able will be required to wear a mask for all indoor activities except meals.

What if I get sick?

  • If at any point you experience COVID symptoms, please refrain from meeting with the group. In this situation, we ask that travelers go back to their hotel room and request a rapid test from the designated contact person.

  • Given that rapid tests often produce false negatives, anyone experiencing COVID symptoms is strongly encouraged to refrain from meeting with the group, even if they received negative test results. Virtual options were available for some activities.

Why Should We Care?

Thinking Through the Museum Community Care Action Plan

TTTM Principal Investigator, Erica Lehrer at the Canadian Museum of History. Photo by: Monica Eileen Patterson

TTTM team on a tour of “Stories my Father Couldn't Tell me: Jeff Thomas Origin” with Rachelle Dickenson at the Ottawa Art Gallery. Photo by: Keisha Cuffie.

TTTM Community Care Action Plan

Raegan Swanson and Keisha Cuffie participating in a workshop at the Canadian Museum of History. Photo by: Monica Eileen Patterson

Thinking Through the Museum is built around the concept of “intersectionality” (coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw) and the recognition that there is power in solidarity when our individual struggles are interconnected. Particularly given how COVID-19 negatively impacted our 2023 gathering, the 2024 organizers have been contemplating how TTTM’s intersectional values can be reflected in a plan for collective actions to keep us safer from illness. 


Research on the long term effects of COVID is still underway, yet it is clear that the stakes are not the same for everyone. According to the CDC, “health inequities from disability, economic, geographic, and other social factors disproportionately affect some groups of people. These inequities can increase the risk of negative health outcomes and impact from Long COVID” (2024).  Indeed, health system inequities are similar to those we see in museums given these institutions shared roots in abeled/white supremacy.  


We thus ask that TTTM travelers consider both their personal risk and their contribution to the risk of those around them (TTTM colleagues, our local partners, and the public). Such attention to collective care demands a higher standard of COVID mitigation strategies than those required by the Canadian government. 

COVID Misconceptions:

  • The pandemic is over

  • COVID is mild now 

  • COVID is like the flu 

  • COVID can only be spread when someone is symptomatic 

  • I’ve been infected already so I am more immune to repeat infections

  • Only “high risk” people need to worry about it

  • I can get medical care if I get some form of Long COVID

  • There’s no point in trying to avoid getting COVID

Here is what the current research tells us:

  • Each infection has a ~1 in 10 chance of causing new, lasting (and potentially disabling) symptoms (aka Long COVID) (Rao et al., 2024). This is true for children and adults (Kuang et al., 2023).

  • Canadians reporting two known or suspected COVID-19 infections (25.4%) were 1.7 times more likely to report prolonged symptoms than those reporting only one known or suspected infection (14.6%), and those with 3 or more infections (37.9%) were 2.6 times more likely (Kuang et al., 2023).

  • 40% of Canadians who reported that they continue to experience long-term symptoms after COVID infection (aka Long COVID) also reported no improvement over time (Kuang et al., 2023).

  • 66.4% of Canadians with Long COVID long-term symptoms did not receive adequate healthcare treatment, service, or support for any of their symptoms (Kuang et al., 2023).

Further Reading + References

Further Reading:

Examples of grassroots organizations doing COVID-activism work on Turtle Island (North America) (not an exhaustive list!):

References:

* Disclaimer: 

The majority of research and resources are from the organizers' local Canadian and American context and may not speak directly to each person's geographic location.

Many sources are drawn from TTTM Project Coordinator Alex Robichaud’s personal research, gathered since mid-2022. Alex credits the following key individuals who have served as hubs for research and information dissemination: