[nabs-l] Presence of disability organizations on college campuses

[Hindley Williams]

Hi Kaiti, 
I am the president of a  disability organization at Villanova University. I have found that getting information out about our group to those who may benefit from it is quite difficult, for the ethical and confidentiality reasons you have described. The ways that we have coped with this issue are not fool-proof, but really helped our group in the early days of its formation. 
The DS office kindly agreed to send out emails to everyone who received services from them at that time. To retain confidentiality, the director used bcc to keep identities of those registered confidential. I suggest that you ask your DS office to send out such an email with these privacy measures, and within that email, you can ask the office  to specify that if students  would be interested in taking part in such a group, they should contact you. Again this isn't a perfect solution but it keeps identities secret as well as puts the message in the hands of every student with a disability on your campus. Hopefully from the feedback that you get, you are able to then compile a list of interested students from that and then follow whatever procedures that your university requires to start a student group. 
I am interested to see how this progresses for you and your university, and I wish you all the best of luck. 
Sincerely, 
Hindley Williams                  

Sent from my iPhone

> On Feb 11, 2015, at 4:04 PM, Kaiti Shelton via nabs-l <nabs-l at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi NABSters,
> 
> I'm hoping to hear some of your thoughts on this:
> 
> Last semester I got in touch with one of the professors I have now so
> we could prepare for her class.  In passing she mentioned a few times
> that she was getting some practice because she currently had a
> visually impaired student in her section for non-music majors.  This
> surprised me, as I had no idea there were other students on campus.  I
> did meet another girl from my hometown in one of my eye specialist's
> waiting rooms who started at UD that semester, but the class was a 300
> level so it was unlikely that it was her (which it wasn't).
> 
> I asked my DS coordinator once if there were any other visually
> impaired people on campus.  She told me only vague things like,
> "You're the only JAWS user," and "We had a deafblind grad student a
> few years ago," but no clue as to what any demographics were like.
> 
> Fast forward to this semester, the girl my professor had joined the
> ensemble that accompanies the course, and I did the same to take
> advantage of the extra credit opportunity.  We had this little "get to
> know you party" at the professor's house, and that was when she and I
> really started talking.  It was like, "Boom" for me, and possibly for
> her as well.  All of a sudden there was someone who understood my
> frustrations with the constant and always moving construction, the
> issues I was having getting my proof of purchase from the bookstore,
> and had the kind of attitude I have about blindness.  We're also both
> interested in things like martial arts, music, and learning about
> different cultures.  We're both juniors as well, although our majors
> have largely accounted for us never bumping into each other until now.
> 
> I absolutely understand the need for confidentiality from a
> professional perspective, but the other girl and I agreed that it
> would have been so beneficial for us to have been able to swap ideas
> and such for the past 3 years.  Our university is all about
> "Community" and "Diversity," yet there are no disability-related
> student organizations on campus.  There are clubs for everything from
> College Democrats and Republicans, to ethnicity-related clubs, and we
> even have a gay-straight alliance called Spectrum.  There is no club
> which acknowledges students with disabilities or provides them a place
> to meet and exchange ideas if they so desire though, so we'd like to
> do something about it.
> 
> From being vice president of a fledgling club before, I know some of
> the specifics about how to get a club started.  You need faculty
> sponsorship (which probably cannot come from the disability office),
> you need a constitution or bylaws, and you need at least 5 people to
> achieve club status.  The tricky thing I see if we end up going
> through with this process will be to market the group to people who
> self-identify as being a student with a disability.  Putting flyers in
> the DS office would make the most sense, but I don't think we'd be
> able to do that.  I also don't think they'd be able to email anything
> we send to them to distribute, and they would never give the list
> email to a single student.  We'd want to make sure it was accessible
> to everyone but even OrgSync can be challenging to use for
> screenreaders (including those who use them for reading and not
> necessarily vision-related disabilities).
> 
> Have any of you started up a club like this successfully?  Is it
> something that was worth the process?  Any ideas?
> 
> -- 
> Kaiti
> 
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