By: Claire
Okay, 2020. You’ve made your point. We’ve sheltered in place. We’ve masked our faces. We’ve sanitized our hands until they were chapped and raw. The world has slogged through a year of unprecedented global heartache, and we’re ready for it to be over. Just ask giphy:
But as the team at HowToUse reflects on this past year, we can’t help but hold tight to the things we’ve accomplished. And we’ve accomplished A LOT. Despite the trials and tribulations of 2020- or maybe even because of them- our team had our nose to the grindstone. We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished, and we hope these accomplishments will continue to serve our community in the years ahead.
Without further ado, we countdown some of our highlights from the year.
Collaborations
What a year for collaborations! We always love partnering with our friends, but in a year like this, shared projects felt all the more valued and important. We particularly loved the work we did with Purple Feminists Group in Myanmar and Leeza Mangaldas in India.
New languages
HowToUse is proud to be a global hub for safe abortion information. That’s why we were thrilled to introduce a new language to our lineup: Yoruba! What new languages lie ahead for us in 2021? Just wait and see!
New Country Profiles
Of the many resources that we offer on our website, our country profiles are consistently some of the most visited pages on our website. This year we added new profiles for Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Guinea, Mali, Niger, and Togo. We’re up to 49 profiles and still expanding!
New Social Media Platforms
Hello, world! In 2020, HowToUse became all the more visible to a global audience by launching content on TikTok and YouTube. Like what we’re creating? Follow us!
Humanitarian Aid Worker Course With Médecins Sans Frontières
We wasted no time getting busy this year. On January 23rd, three years after Trump signed the Global Gag Rule back into effect, HowToUse and Médecins Sans Frontières launched our safe abortion course for Humanitarian Aid Workers. We loved collaborating with the MSF team, and were proud to see how the story gained traction in the press.
Certificated Online Learning Courses
Our Humanitarian Aid Worker course wasn’t the only big change on to our eLearning courses. In September, we migrated our free, multilingual courses to a new interactive platform. The courses are still free, but now come with a downloadable certificate of achievement once students pass the course quiz. Keep your eye on our eLearning in 2021- there’s still more to come!
Ally, The World’s First Abortion Chatbot
And of course, how could we talk about 2021 without celebrating Ally, our safe abortion chatbot? Ally is available 24/7 to offer information and resources to our users, both on our website and Facebook. Have a question? Feel free to ask her! Curious about the abortion process? Let her guide you through it. Ally is here to be an immediate support for our global community. Curious what she has up her sleeve for next year? We’ll give you a hint: she’s been studying quite a lot of languages.
As 2020 draws to a close, the team at HowToUse wishes you all a safe and restful end of year. Our blog will be taking a break for the next few weeks, but we’ll see you in the year ahead. Here’s to 2021 being… well, anything other than a repeat of 2020.
Hugs and solidarity,
The HowToUse Team
Claire is a teacher, reproductive rights advocate, and the manager of https://www.howtouseabortionpill.org/.