2021 Proclamations

If you follow The Canary Project (formerly known as The Naked Project)'s work, you may know that one of our projects every year is to make a formal request for the Washington State Governor to sign a proclamation declaring the month of May to be officially recognized as MCS Awareness month in our home state. Because the proclamations are only made for one specific year and do not renew, this has to be done every year. We feel that this recognition from the Governor is hugely important for MCS gaining recognition overall as a legitimately disabling, life altering condition.

Last year, at the beginning of 2020, we set out to go bigger. In past years there have been a handful of states that had someone doing this same thing and there was a website that used to collect and store them for anyone curious to find. The operators of that website, being canaries themselves, unfortunately have not been able to continue due to health deteriorating. So we at The Canary Project took up the task and started rallying volunteers around the country and around the word in other countries.

We had some great initial momentum with volunteers jumping on board in 16 states, and 2 Canadian provinces! We posted template letters and proclamation wording on the site (can be found from the menu above, under state proclamations tab). Then, well, we all know what happened in 2020. Many state's offices were shuttered, and Governors with their hands full of COVID-19 response, were understandably not able to make signing ceremonial proclamations a priority.

Its a new year, though! We are ready to jump back in with renewed enthusiasm and see if we can make forward progress toward getting all 50 states this year! Please reach out if you are willing to get involved and make this request of your state's Governor.