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

[Lucy Sirianni]

Hi Kaiti,

I started an organization for students with disabilities when I 
was an undergrad at Johns Hopkins.  I anticipated running into 
the kinds of challenges you're concerned about, but actually, the 
school's Disability Services office was happy to send out any 
email I asked them to (BCCing all students to retain 
confidentiality until I was able to create a listserv for 
interested students) and in fact ended up offering the group a 
space to meet, money for food for our gatherings, etc.  I didn't 
start this process until my last year at Hopkins, and I am not 
sure whether the group continues to meet, but initially there was 
strong interest, with at least 10-15 students with various 
disabilities attending the first meetings.  I'm now a grad 
student at UC Berkeley, where there are several groups for 
students with disabilities, including one specifically for blind 
students that's organized by our Disability Services office 
itself.  In short, you might be pleasantly surprised by the 
support your DS office is willing to offer, so I'd approach the 
folks who work there and see what happens.

Good luck, and I hope this helps!

Lucy

----- Original Message -----
From: Kaiti Shelton via nabs-l <nabs-l at nfbnet.org
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org
Date sent: Wed, 11 Feb 2015 16:04:06 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Presence of disability organizations on college 
campuses

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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