This was a long - years in the making. I had a friend and we've called it out before on this podcast, but she wasn't a friend of mine. Yet. At that point, she was just a colleague who had mentored me a little bit for dysphasia class. And at the time, probably didn't mean No, no, me from Sam. But Inessa, Humbert had some issues with Asha. And I was watching all of this unfold online, and her friends were doing a great job like with this letter writing campaign, and I was like, man, it would be really amazing if we had some kind of centralized system, or like central place to put all this stuff out from because people were posting and friends were pushing, but they didn't necessarily have a big platform. And I just thought the medical SLP world could really use something like that. With that impostor syndrome. I was like, well, it's not going to be me. But it would be a great idea. So that's my bed SLP advocate or the idea of it was formed. And then, I don't know a year or so later, maybe a year and a half later, I don't know in the timeline, an SLP it in the medical SLP space, serve some cease and desist letters to our professions best in my opinion. And I didn't know any of them. But I was watching again, online. I knew one of them professionally, but I was watching online as they're telling what happened to them. And like, how is this fair, I don't like the man telling you what to do. And even though this was a woman, I'm watching someone tell them to sit down and shut up. And their businesses and their livelihoods be threatened. And I was like, This is not fair. And I will not stand for this, even though I'm nobody. Somebody needs to help them. And so I volunteered to have a fundraiser so they could hire lawyers, and fight if they wanted to. And they didn't all take me up on it. But I very quickly did some fundraising. And I raised over $7,000, and formed what's called the med SLP Advocacy Fund. And I'm not an idiot, because I was like, Well, I guess med SLP advocates bore now because if I'm going to do this, people are going to need a place to go. So I might as well start building my platform now. And so we ran it through that there was money leftover and I protected the money and took some steps to make sure it was safe and just got contacted by I got a referral from one of those ladies and said, This person is going to need money and just got an invoice. So I'm still, you know, helping people out with that money. But it's all private. And you know, I don't announce that it's personal for those people. And then in that process, I met the co founder of fix SLP. And we kind of went on this journey together of what are the issues in the field and we came together which are bought with a bunch of other professionals and did the SLP Data Initiative, I have the account, I manage the account now just because fix SLP kind of sprung out of it and and so it made sense that I continue to check in on that account since I'm online every day anyway. But we ran a survey that over 7000 people responded to not 7000 didn't do it to completion that was just over 5001 of the biggest surveys in the field completed to date. So you can look at what your colleagues thought are strengths and weaknesses in the field. That's all it I think we just decided to shut down the website. But the Instagram account is still there. SLP data initiative, we said that we're gonna have real solutions as part of this project. And one thing led to another and we as we were trying to figure it out, we had other SLPs pockets, which is a limited series podcast about negotiating for better pay in the field. And then we kind of landed on fixed SLPs it was just this years years of just a little seed of an idea that we kind of need a place to push stuff out of out from when there's problems and and if you look back at my med SLP advocate account, I kind of manifested everything that fixed SLP is doing like one of my first posts is who is the med SLP advocate and what can you expect for this account? And I think just about everything I said I was going to do through that account is happening through fixed SLP on a much larger scale. So again, that's wild to me because it It's like, these are the things I want to do for this profession. And now I'm doing them way more than I could have ever imagined. And as things were happening, it's not like I was looking at that list, I kind of abandoned that account because I can only run so many things. But one day, I went back to post a picture and say, like, Hey, if you're looking for me, this is where you'll find me. And so I was looking at what was pinned, and I was like, Oh, my gosh, I'm doing all of this. It came true. So, you know, there's there's power and manifesting what you want for your future. I think there's something to that.
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