Migraine Foundation Aotearoa New Zealand is one year old. And in compliance with the advice that people with migraine receive to moderate their lifestyles, instead of clinking champagne and chowing into cake, we’re taking a moment to catch our breath and meditate on the happy moments over the past year.
It felt like a slow birth, but it was only five months from the first online meeting of the three co-founders at the end of October 2021 until we were registered as an Incorporated Society on 21 March 2022 and our website went live on 1 April 2022.
Since then, it’s been a baby with a relentless appetite that we’ve been racing to keep fed. Here’s a snapshot of our first year through some rather objective numbers, though we like to think we’re making a difference in innumerable other subjective ways too (that we hope our supporters will agree with):
- 628 followers on Instagram
- 552 members in our private Facebook Support Group
- 535 followers on Facebook
- 530 responses to our inaugural online Migraine in Aotearoa New Zealand Survey
- 358 tweets on Twitter
- 166 Instagram posts
- 141 followers on Twitter
- 97 followers on LinkedIn
- 42 news articles published on our website
- 15 founding members
- 12 Voices of Migraine community stories
- 10 online newsletters sent to our subscribers
- 4 students from the School of Population Health at Auckland University working on projects for us
- 3 neurologists joining our Clinical Advisory Group for its first meeting during February 2023
- 3 press releases, 3 articles about migraine published in health professional publications, 4 other media articles
- 3 in-person support group meet-ups
- 2 letters of feedback to Pharmac about their processes (read here, and read here)
- 2 printed resources
- 1 application to Pharmac to fund Emgality
- 1 advocacy toolkit to help our community add their voices to the call for better funding of migraine treatments
- 1 application to the Ministry of Health to request that questions about migraine be included in their annual national New Zealand Health Survey
- 1 Official Information Act request
- 1 unofficial data release
- 1 webinar for health professionals and 1 online education module for GPs
- 1 online awareness campaign with 3 prize giveaways
- 1 virtual Christmas party
- 1 podcast interview
Plus countless emails, WhatsApp messages, social media comments, virtual meetings and so many people who have encouraged, helped and supported us.
During our first birthday month, we want to thank you all for your involvement. We’re grateful, humbled and excited all at once to have reached this milestone and see so much potential for the future. Bring on the terrible (or hopefully terrific) twos!
