Aromantic-spectrum Awareness Week begins on February 21st, 2021, but the work for it begins now! As of the end of 2020, 6 states in the US have officially recognized Ace Week (updated to include Virginia), yet no states have recognized ASAW. Luckily, the process for requesting your state to recognize ASAW is fairly simple, and we at TAAAP are here to make it even easier. Submitting a proclamation request to your governor or mayor is a 5 step process:
- Have an address in said state. You can also, in most cases, submit a proclamation request for a district, commonwealth, city, or county. This will still require that the person who submits the request has an address in that location.
- Check the deadline for proclamation requests. Some states, like Connecticut, are not currently accepting proclamation requests due to COVID-19. Most states have a 30 or 45 day deadline – for ASAW 2021, that would be January 21st or 6th.
- Contact any organization you would like to sponsor the proclamation. We encourage you work with any local aro-focused organizations or any organizations you are apart of to make the request more personalized and more relevant to your local government. This database hosted by Aces and Aros is a good place to start. Some states/areas may not even require a sponsor organization. If you need a sponsoring organization and cannot find a local one, TAAAP is willing to sponsor as long as you give us a heads up. Please be sure to do this, as most areas limit ceremonial proclamations to one or two per organization per calendar year, and we will need to keep these numbers in mind once Ace Week rolls around! Information for using TAAAP as a sponsor is included in our template; for any other group, simply insert their name and a quick 2 or 3 sentence blurb about what they do.
- Copy and paste our template into the request form. Our template provides info for: an event description/message, 6 whereas clauses, and a description of our organization if you use TAAAP as a sponsor. The proclamation request forms for different states, cities, etc will require different information, but our template did our best to account for any questions you may be asked. If you need further help, contact us at [email protected] and we will do our best to help.
- Wait for a response! For states that have a deadline far out from the actual week, it may feel like you are waiting forever for a response. We encourage you to remain hopeful and let us know if you are successful! You may also want to get in touch with the local government’s LGBTQ+ liaison, if there is one, as well as the office in charge of ceremonial proclamations.
That’s really it! We hope this is a useful springboard for getting ASAW recognized in your local area. A ceremonial proclamation may feel small or overly formal, but it provides our community legitimacy and visibility, and provides a starting point for pursuing legal inclusion and rights for aromantic people.
Note: We don’t know the process for requesting a proclamation anywhere outside the US. Some of this may be relevant internationally, and we hope it helps, but we can’t guarantee that the process is similar at all.
The template we linked is based on the Ace Week Proclamation template created by Seattle Aces and Aros. This was also spurred by Ace Week’s/Asexual Outreach’s effort to get Ace Week recognized in multiple states. Credit and thanks to them for providing us a starting point.