Letter to Community

Dear Community Member,

Welcome to World Vasectomy Day and thank you for showing up.

We know that there are a lot of important causes you can join and many issues to be supported, so we hope you’ll consider being part of ours.

What makes WVD unique, and I venture to say successful, is our commitment to create a collectively created movement. While we are do all in our power to assure that men, and women, who want to learn about and ultimately choose a vasectomy as their family’s best family planning option, have access to that information and opportunity, we don’t stop there.

For us, a vasectomy is not just the beginning of a new relationship with our bodies – even though for many it is the first time we choose a voluntary procedure.  We believe that when treated as a ritual of personal and physical transformation, it can serve as a jumping off point to pursue positive social change as we work together to make for a kinder and more compassionate world. Indeed, our organizing principle is to aggregate individual acts of love into a collective movement for positive social change.

The key is word is collective, so to succeed in our mission, we depend on the participation of thousands including:

• Passionate vasectomy providers – including doctors, urologists, gynecologists and in some countries, nurse practitioners.
• Family planning and sexual and reproductive health experts, specialists and advocates.
• Men who have chosen a vasectomy and men who choose to get one.
• Women who support their partners – and friends, brothers, and sons.

Why a movement and not just a program?

Instead of programs or campaigns that last only as long as the funding, WVD continues to grow because it is a participatory and interactive experience whose growth depends on the collective pursuit of a shared goal.

Be it to gain control over your own fertility and provide that opportunity for others, be it to lower humanity’s carbon footprint or to improve gender relations, or simply to encourage more compassion and share the responsibility of family planning with women – at the heart of our movement is a ritual of personal commitment and, to a certain degree, sacrifice.  Our goal is not just to increase the number of men who get a vasectomy, but to convert this powerful and personal choice into collective action.

To achieve this overall objective, World Vasectomy Day, combines traditional storytelling with interactive technologies to link acts of love into a collective movement for social good.  In our website, all of this information is available and it grows as we grow.

We achieve success when we inspire men who have had a vasectomy to champion the procedure to their brothers, friends and neighbors.  We increase our impact when women join in and participate in critical conversations that are rarely shared. We develop technical capacity through a global network of vasectomy providers who exchange and share knowledge.  We attract the best and brightest storytellers, some of whom are professional filmmakers, but many of whom are merely creative and conscientious people. We work with institutions, organizations and governments to achieve scale.

And when all of this comes together, change happens!

How did it begin?

ON May 9th, 2012, after a year making a film about Dr. Doug Stein, one of the world’s most passionate vasectomy providers and WVD’s co founder, and recording 100s of men explaining that they had chosen a vasectomy out of love for their children, their partners and the planet that I set an intention to convince 100 doctors in 20 countries to do 1000 vasectomies in 24 hours.

By day’s end I had reserved the URL,  wvd.org and our movement was launched.  Today, with more than 1000 participating providers, we are the largest male focused family planning movements in history…and growing.

What has WVD grown into? 

It is a social media communications project that unites men, women, vasectomy providers and health care activists in a collective mission to increase male participation in sexual and reproductive health.

It is the vasectomy-provider community linked by a list-serve, where doctors share practical information and successful solutions to common challenges.

It is a once-a-year ‘vasectomy-thon’ in which vasectomy providers throughout the world provide high quality vasectomies to men whose families are complete.

It is a 24 hour live-stream program that is shared across multiple time zones with contributions from men getting vasectomies, vasectomy providers, leaders in family planning, contributions from wives, partners and mothers as well as documentaries and animations produced over the year.

It is an opportunity to educate men and women about a variety of family planning options.

It is a week-long event that is produced from our rotating headquarters where we work with local providers and health care providers to build sustainable vasectomy programs.

It is a symposium where the best and the brightest share their knowledge and experience with next generation leaders.

It is a year round effort to increase awareness through communication and community.

It is an ongoing movement that works with Ministries of Health to harness the best in men and channels their commitment to build more respectful and more equitable  gender relations.

It is the largest male-oriented sexual and reproductive health event ever.

It is a community of activists seeking new ways to work as one towards a brighter future for all.

If we’re going to achieve our purpose we need you to join us and in helping build that future!

Join here!

Sincerely,

Jonathan Stack, Co Founder World Vasectomy Day