 Ableton On Air is sponsored by Green Mountain Support Services, empowering people with disabilities to be home in the community. Washington County Mental Health, where hope and support comes together. Media sponsors for Ableton On Air include Park Chester Times, Muslim Community Report, WWW, This Is The Bronx.info, Associated Press Media Editors, New York Parrot Online Newspaper, U.S. Press Corps, Domestic and International, Anchor FM, and Spotify. Partners for Ableton On Air include The Hard New York and New England, where everyone belongs, the Orthodox Union, the Vermont Division for the Blind and Visually Impaired, the Vermont Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired, the Montpelier Sustainable Coalition. Ableton On Air has been seen in the following publications. Park Chester Times, New York Parrot Online Newspaper, Muslim Community Report, WWW, This Is The Bronx.info, and www.h.com. Ableton On Air is a member of the National Academy for Television Arts and Sciences, Boston, New England Chapter. Hello and welcome to this edition of Ableton On Air, the one and only program that focuses on the needs, concerns and achievements of the Deaf and the Abled. I've always been your host, Lauren Seiler. Before we begin our show, we would like to say special thanks to Green Mountain Support Services for this opportunity to promote their conference. And we're also sponsored by Washington County Mental Health and many many many others, including the support from the Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired of Vermont, the Division for the Blind and Visually Impaired of Vermont, the Montpelier Sustainable Coalition of Vermont, and also Habitat for Humanity of Central Vermont. That's a whole mouthful. Welcome to Ableton On Air, Josh. Joshua Smith, Executive Director of Green Mountain Support Services. Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm excited to talk to you again. Okay, good. You've been on the show before to talk about conferences and so on and so forth, and since we're in, since we are in a COVID mindset at this point, we're talking about the sixth annual, the sixth annual conference which is online, it's virtual, the sixth annual Cerebral Palsy Conference, and by the way, you can go to, for that, you can go to www.CerebralPalsyConference.org and also gmssi.org. Josh, why don't you talk a little bit, well, you have a half an hour, but why don't you talk about the conference and what you guys are doing this year? Yeah, so we're doing this in our sixth annual conference and we're super excited to do this. This is the second year we're doing it virtually this year. And so one of the things that we've done differently this year is that we're doing it, we have three tiers of registration. The first one is free. We've never been able to do it for I mean to give people free admission because ultimately what it is is that we're doing it for is for people living with cerebral palsy, for friends and family people who are living with cerebral palsy, this is a great opportunity for people to network and share education and share stories. And in order to do that, it's super important to make sure that we have the ability for people to come out of any, you know, any background, any location, because it's all virtual and all you really need is, you know, an internet connection. Now, you have your organization hasn't been able to do the conference for free before. Why is that, you know, because now during COVID people are not just people with special needs, but people in general are having issues with paying for things, you know, they got to pay for their bills and so on. Why is it important to have conferences for free sometimes? We're not doing this for the money. We're doing this to make sure that people are able to connect with each other. One of the amazing things that we saw last year, and last year was our first time doing it virtually, and we planned on doing it virtually even before COVID because we were able to get the, we were able to buy the setup back in November 2019 before COVID hit because we knew the only way for this conference to succeed is to make sure that we're open for everyone, because one of the challenges that people talk to us about when we did it in Connecticut last year is like, I can't drive to Connecticut. I don't have the ability to get on a plane or I don't have the money for that. So what we decided to do before COVID, even before I said before COVID hit, is that we wanted to do it virtually, because that's the best way to access as many people as we can all around the world. Yeah. Arlene, you want to ask questions? Go ahead. Yeah. One of the things that we did this year, from one, we are kind of like minding, you know, minding bodies. So we're doing a lot of things for mental health and all of the things for physical health for people. And the other thing we're doing this year is we're having focuses on not just for adults living cerebral palsy, but also for parents who might have children living with cerebral palsy. And the benefit for that is so we have our audiences, our speakers looking to, you know, support people with cerebral palsy, whether they're parents, guardians, or people that work at agencies. Now, explaining the history of your conferences, because I understand Jim Kavanaugh is a big, you know, he started the conferences. So he's a big person within the conference. So can you explain the mission of that and, you know, why the conference was started because of him? I think 2016. We chatted, he, Jim Kavanaugh is a gentleman that we provide services for. And he told us that he wanted to go to a cerebral palsy conference. And we're like, sure, that makes, sure, we'll see what we can come up with. Turns out the closest cerebral palsy conference in 2016 from Vermont was California. So what we decided to do is the whole Yankee ingenuity situation that you can find that in New England is that we decided to make our own cerebral palsy conference. And they, too, of cerebral palsy conference, and our entire agenda, as anybody can go to, is cerebral palsyconference.org. Check it out. We have an entire list of what are, who our speakers are on our agenda. And day two, it's two days long. It's October 1st and October 2nd. And on October 2nd, the morning of it is going to be, we're actually going to be showing, enabled it on air episode, where he talks about his reasons for how the cerebral palsy conference started. Okay. Now, not because I'm looking, so it's, yeah, cerebral palsyconference.org. So explain how the conference works virtually, because, you know, some people might not have ever gone to a virtual conference. If you go to cerebral palsyconference.org, there's a registration button that you can click on. And you click on that, and then you register with your email address. That's all we need. And from there, you'll be sent a link to access the, you'll access the conference. That's three tiers of it. And unfortunately, as of today, that's recording the third, that the last tier is not applicable anymore. It's not available anymore, because it's for sending a physical package for that. But we have the two ones. Of course, as we said earlier, there's the free one where you can actually access for free. So you're able to attend the conference, free, no problem. The second tier, which costs $20 is a bit, it gives the attendee the ability to access the conference for 60 days afterwards. So you can see everything on demand. But the benefit to that as well is that you are able to, because here's the thing, you can show up, go for free, no, of course, to have as much fun as you want. But we have always two consecutive sessions happening at once. So you're not able to see everything for free, because there's two sessions happening at once. But for $20, you're able to then watch any of them on demand that you please for 60 days after. Plus, we're going to throw in the ability for people to look at the on demand sessions from last year. So you're talking about over 24 hours. So it's like TV, it's like a television network on demand for people with disabilities. From the CP conference. But I'm viewing it because, I'm viewing it like TV because, like television, because there's a lot of these on demand channels. Yeah, Netflix, Hulu and others. Now, talk about your the importance of your the Greenmont Support Services podcast in relation to the conference because you guys have a podcast CP conversations. So let's talk a little bit about that if we can. Sure. So what we're doing with that, that's actually with our good friend Nicole Luongo, who is a really good advocate, a really good self-advocate for folks living in cerebral palsy. She was able to house for this first year to house conversations and have speakers come on and she's been really great for us. So it's kind of a companion podcast for the cerebral palsy conference. So I'm looking on the website and it says view conference agenda. So let's see what we've got here a little bit here and go from there. How long have you been doing these conferences? This is our sixth annual so this is our sixth year doing it. Wow. So let's see. You have here and this is all online. So starting at 10 a.m. check in and visit the exhibitors. So this is this will be set up similar to a real conference but online and all people who have to do is just click the links, correct? And it goes from 10 to 4 according to this. Now explain the missions and goals. We have 15 minutes left. So we can talk about your agency as a whole. Explain the missions and goals of Green Mountain Support Services and the importance of keeping these conference going. So as I mentioned earlier, we're a mission-driven organization. So our job is to make sure that we ensure anybody living with disabilities are at home in their own community. So which means that what we need to do is we firmly believe we don't do segregated settings. We don't do congregate settings. What we do as an agency is make sure that everybody has the same access to everything that everybody else does in their own neighborhood. It doesn't matter what color your skin is, what religion you are, what background where you're from or what your level of disability is, you should still access the same things everybody else does. And part of this from what we're doing with our Super Palsy Conference, it's a stage for advocacy. It's a stage to have people be more educated and learn and being able to share stories with each other because the thing is that there's so many people that are living with Super Palsy. There's 750,000 people living with Super Palsy in the United States alone. And giving them a platform that is created, that was created by people living with Super Palsy, for people living with Super Palsy. And this is, it's only, it's a very unique and it's the only one that exists right now in the United States. Any more questions you want to ask, Arlene? Yes. Now here's the thing. What are some of the misconceptions that you say that there's a lot of people with Super Palsy around the country? What are the misconceptions around people with disabilities when like people first meet them, whether you have Super Palsy or autism or any other type of specialty? That part. Some of who's not living in Super Palsy. I don't quite know the answer to that. And, but I do know is that when we do have these events, I always see people kind of figure, oh, I didn't know that. Oh, I didn't know that. It's one of those situations where the more you learn about Super Palsy, you learn that it's not, there's not one standard thing about it. Like there's always people have, people have different anything like that. So, but yeah, I would say it's just enough for us as an agency, like our job at hosting this conference is giving people that, you know, you know, make connections, things that we keep working on to do. And make more awareness of it, you know, people, you know. Exactly. Now, your agency's been around for how long? For 30 years, correct? So yeah, over 30 years now. Yeah. Okay. And all right, so what is the future, the main future of the amount of support services and these conferences? And I think for the conference, I think what we're, you know, or what we want to do is make this as accessible to as many people as possible. And, and one of those is just, you know, creating a robust networking community for people to communicate and talk to each other and being able to be part of this community, make sure we create this, you know, minority of self advocacy and networking is super important for us. How important? I'm not quite sure because it is virtual. So they, it's, you know, be as accessible as possible as that we can do. And I guess what we could do is there's not much we can do because it is all virtual. So if somebody doesn't have a laptop or something, then would you, well, no, no, no, no, no, seriously, would you consider next year if you do another virtual conference? But those that don't, because there are some people in Vermont that probably do not have access to computer, would you consider lending tablets out for this conference or, or, you know, or computers out for that, you know, for that matter? I know we're talking with our community to try to do, if we do a hybrid, like having a physical location as well as a, a high as a virtual location as well. So that's, that's a possibility. Then you get into the, make it a question of how do people, you know, physically get to the locations as well. Okay, well, now I'm noticing here and I want something jumped up at me. There's an event going on in your virtual conference that that basically doesn't, there's like us, it says how to use your social media for self advocacy. Okay. So what exactly will that entail? So basically, I guess it's going to talk about Facebook and stuff, or is there more, there's more to so, you know, because social media basically been crazy, you know, there's a lot of things that social media people shouldn't be watching these days. But how will, how will this work? You know, or do you have like synopsys of, of, does the website have synopsys of, of what's going on in the conferences? Yes, I do. Yeah. So all you have to do is go to CerebralPalsyConference.org, click on the 2021 speakers, and then click on that for Chelsea Bear, who is really big in the social media world. And then what you do is you would just click on her, her write up and it talks about what she'll be talking about on that, on that breakout session. Is there anything that we haven't touched on that's important for this conference or your agency? I would say just, you know, please, you know, go to W, you know, go to CerebralPalsyConference.org, check it out. You can also see all of our past events that we've done. So it's a really good, almost a museum of the entire conference over the last several years. So yeah, you know, our previous, our previous exhibitors, our previous speakers that we've had, our previous keynote speakers that we've had, yeah, it's all there. It's a great source of all information. Arlene, any more questions? Any last questions? Dad, what if you had your own TV network to put this on TV? Yeah, will, will, will, is Green Mountain Post Services thinking about bringing the conferences more out into the open? Like you say, you said it's on demand. So would you think about maybe doing a CerebralPalsy type of TV network online with other, other speakers and other things, other presentations? Well, we kind of already have that with our, with our, with our podcasts. Because you, anybody can go and watch those on YouTube right now, go to our YouTube channel, and you can see all of our, all of our past, all of our previous conversations that we had. But as I say, the point of keeping the actual breakout sessions, we want to make sure that we want to have people who pay for those, to still have access to those. So it doesn't make sense for us to make those free, because then it's not fair to the people who paid to see those. But all of our, all I think what we have is over, you know, 10 or so, 10 or so interviews that Nicole DeWongo did for us are available to watch anytime now, just going to our, just, you know, clicking on CerebralPalsyConference.org and then going to the About Us section, and you can see the CP conversations right there. Well, we would like to thank you for joining us on this edition of Able Don't Hand. For more information on the CerebralPalsy Conference, you can go to www.CerebralPalsyConference.org. The conference is the New England CerebralPalsy Sixth Annual Conference. Again, it's www.CerebralPalsyConference.org and it is October 1st and 2nd. For more information on, and by the way, Able Don't Hand will be at the conference. You can probably click a link and see past shows of Able Don't Hand from Green Mouth Support Services or Jim Cavanaugh's interview. Also, you can, you know, pay, Josh, you said it was $20 for those that want to... Correct. $20 for anybody that wants to see it for 60 days afterwards, and plus all of our previous sessions from the year before. Okay, and we would like to thank Green Mouth Support Services and other supporters such as Washington County Mental Health, the Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired, the Division for the Blind and Visually Impaired, and many, many others. I'm Lauren Seiler. I'm Lauren Seiler. See you next time. Partners for Able Don't Hand include Yechad, New York, and New England, where everyone belongs, the Orthodox Union, the Vermont Division for the Blind and Visually Impaired, the Vermont Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired, the Montpelier Sustainable Coalition. Able Don't Hand has been seen in the following publications, Park Chester Times, New York Parrot Online Newspaper, Muslim Community Report, www.thisisabronx.info, and www.h.com. Able Don't Hand is a member of the National Academy for Television Arts and Sciences Boston, New England Chapter.