July news - Canada, and website upgrades

Hi all you fine Patreon Supporter folks, it's time for ...you know, the thing!! The thing!!! That we do every month, in letter form, for news. :3

The biggest news is that we are officially moving forwards with incorporating a new branch in Canada, which is also planned to be a charity. Details on the how and why are in the newsletter. Ultimately, we are welcoming 3 new people - Mecknavorz, Socks the Tiger, and Aury/LunaDash - to the Boards of Directors (yes plural!!), and waving a warm goodbye to Serathin, our former Treasurer, who had been with us since 2018.

Each of our new folks wrote an introduction for themselves in the article - they're awesome! Like seriously, I already knew a lot of these folks' credentials and how effective they are, but I'm even more impressed upon reading what they wrote. For example, Meck has an even more extensive programming and engineering background than I thought. I had no idea that Socks, in addition to engineering, also had experience as a therapist and dance teacher. And I didn't realize that Aury had helped launch a new platform for online education. It's so cool to be able to work alongside folks like these. I'm so excited that we are giving these folks the runway that they've earned several times over, and can't wait to see how they help lead us into the future.

The second article discusses some recent upgrades to our website, for the menu system as well as how tables of contents work on long pages. A couple months ago, as we were reviewing some things for the Gender Affirmation Resources project, our new team member Crakzeno brought up the fact that navigation among (and within) the project's pages was difficult, and the more we thought about it, the harder it was to excuse. She was exactly right, and it was an issue that affected the usefulness of the resources in the first place. So, we worked to figure out what sorts of capabilities would resolve the navigation issues. The types of information on our website are unusually broad and deep, and we couldn't find any examples of similar websites that we were happy with. Therefore, we designed and implemented a new system from scratch. While still imperfect (and we'll continue refining a bit more), we hope it makes for a much better experience.

Thank you as always for supporting us and our mission, and being part of our community!