CKY members began their survey of Lexington restrooms

 The Central Kentucky chapter's fairness work team has been very busy over the last couple of weeks surveying restrooms and getting petitions signed. Last Saturday three teams of four walked around downtown Lexington w/ a checklist and surveyed restrooms in the Carnegie Center, the Living Arts and Science Center, the Main Library, Third Street Stuff, Doodles, Giacommos Deli, The Marathon station on MLK and 3rd St, Alfalfa restaurant, Jonathon's at Gratz Park and the Lexington History museum.

Members used a checklist developed by a student group at UC Santa Barbara called P.I.S.S.A.R (People In Search of Safe and Accessible Restrooms) to conduct the survey. The checklists are broken down into three sections. The first addresses access for people with disabilities. This requires the person doing the surveying to measure things like the width of the bathroom door, the distance from the grab bar to the floor and height of the sink. The second section of the checklist is regarding transgender and gender variant folks and asks questions like "Is the restroom in a safe and well lit area?" and "Are the doors marked with gender specific signs or gender neutral ones?" The last section of the checklists pertains to childcare and aims to find out if there are changing tables in the restroom (regardless of whether they're male or female restrooms).

The teams also carried with them petitions they'd designed and asked folks they met to support their efforts, which resulted in several really great conversations. You can view the petition by clicking here: Safe restroom petition

The rain this Saturday made is so we couldn't go out and do more surveys but we were able to have a really good meeting where we talked about how this campaign fits into KFTC's overall goals to challenge and change unjust institutions, overcome discrimination, help people to participate and to communicate a message of what is possible.

For more information about this campaign you can download our brochure: Safe restroom trifold brochure or go to www.kftc.org/safe