Exciting News for 2020! #MillionsMissing London is in Parliament Square on 13th May. London will play host to a major demonstration aimed at highlighting the plight of ME sufferers across the globe. London #Millions Missing is thrilled to announce that they are collaborating with the Florence Nightingale Museum in her bicentennial year, 200 years after her birth. Now it is the time to send your stories so they can be displayed at the event.
The registration form for all UK #MillionsMissing demonstrations is available here, while tips, toolkits and other resources are being updated here.
Those of you who think of Florence as a nurse might be surprised to hear that she was bedridden for 30 years on her return from the Crimea with an ME-like fluctuating illness. Her persistent campaigning #FromHerBed changed the face of nursing and health care around the world. Her efforts were not universally welcomed and she faced resistance from politicians and doctors. Despite her own ill-health she continued to campaign for many years using lobbying, personal contacts and her gift for statistics to prove her point.
The links between her and the #MillionsMissing with ME are obvious. She was sometimes dismissed as an hysterical female or malingerer. Despite this, she used her math’s genius to prove that her sanitation reforms greatly improved survival rates. She used numbers to fight against prejudice and outdated and old-fashioned thinking by the medical profession, and she won.
London #MillionsMissing wants to demonstrate the links between disabled campaigners across the centuries and is asking people to send in their demands, comments, stories and statistics on quilt squares. Tell us, and your MPs, what you’re missing from life. We will make these into quilts to display at the London #MillionsMissing event which we are holding on 13th May in Parliament Square between 3-5pm. Part of the quilt will then be displayed by the Florence Nightingale Museum. (London #MillionsMissing won’t be using or asking for shoes for the London event this year).
How to send in your stories
1. Send your message using this link https://airtable.com/shr8oElgEEJXLvNIX by 17th April to give us time to include it in the quilt. Please keep it to 150 characters so it will fit onto the quilt square.
We will write your message on a square of material for you. It must fit on a 10 inch square with ¼ hem allowance to give us enough space to sew it together with other squares.
2. Write or sew or stick your message and decoration onto a white 10 inch square of material with ¼ inch hem allowance and email uk@meaction.net for the address to send it to. It will be joined with others and sewn into a quilt. It must arrive by 17th April.
3. Sew your own message quilt and bring it to the London demonstration or email uk@meaction.net for the address to send it to us. Please send it to arrive by 4th May or bring it along on the day. You can use any size of square or pattern but we need to be able to hold it up for display so don’t make it too deep. Our volunteers aren’t very tall so we are keeping our quilts to 4x 10 inch squares deep around 3ft 6 in or 105cm. We are using the colours red/white/black.
If you are an experienced sewer and would like to join our team of quilters to help make our quilts please get in touch by contacting uk@meaction.net. We are so excited to see what you produce!
Here are some examples that we have put together using messages from previous #MillionsMissing events.
