 opportunities and resources for accessibility. Just a reminder, this is being live streamed. The camera is directly back there, so if you need to get up and walk around, try not to walk in front of the camera this way, horizontally from left to right. Today's presenters are Beth Banvenu, Director of Office of Accessibility, the NEA. Lauren Tozzolino, Accessibility Specialist, the NEA. Amy Gabriel, Deputy Director for Administration, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Ann Mulgrave, Manager of Grants and Accessibility, Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council. And Allison Ballard, Director of Justice Program, University of St. Francis. Just a reminder, they are going to leave time for questions and answers. If there are a couple of people who will volunteer to run the mic around, please don't ask your question before a mic comes to you. And last but not least, you will find small green sheets on your tables for evaluations for this session. The Kennedy Center would greatly appreciate your feedback. And that's all yours, Beth. And thank you all for coming. This is a great group. If any of you feel like moving up a little bit closer, feel free. So as you said, my name is Beth Banvenu. I direct the Office of Accessibility at the National Endowment for the Arts. And I'm happy to have Lauren here to help me with the first start of the presentation, and then we'll bring up a few of our guest speakers. So the goal of this session is to help you understand what is available for funding at the NEA and also at the state arts agencies. Can I get a show of hands that I'll describe? How many of you have received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts? Wow. Quite a good number of people in the room have received funding from the NEA. How many of you have received funding from your state arts agency? Also a good number, a little fewer. And from your local arts council. And that could be the city, the county, so fewer, but still a good number. So there is a lot of funding out there, some for accessibility-related work, disability-related work, and other projects. So we'll talk a bit about the opportunities and what you can do with those funds. The NEA is in its 50th year. We were founded almost 51 years ago to serve the country. And we have fact sheets that I'll be putting out on the table on what we've done for accessibility over the past years. And also we had an online policy dialogue on careers in the arts for people with disabilities. I talked about it at the spotlight session earlier today, and we have some extra copies that I will put out. But first I'd like to invite my colleague Lauren up here to talk a bit about what we will be doing today. Great. Some of the goals for this session and what we're going to be talking about today. So we're talking about a lot of funding we'll be hearing from our state and local representatives about what funding opportunities are available to you there. Well, Beth and I will be talking about what the NEA offers in terms of our grants. But then also some other things that we'd like to go into is before the grant-making process begins or you start looking into grants and funding, is what can you possibly be doing internally, more creative in your own organizations, to be more accessible so that in terms of being resourceful in that aspect? What are some examples of projects that are currently being funded, that are accessibility focused, or how can you enhance some projects that you already have to make them more accessible? And then also the examples of best practices, and then as I mentioned earlier, is being creative. And how when you are writing those grants, and this is something that Allison Ballard, one of our speakers today, or NEA Grantee, will be speaking about her experience in putting together their grants and focusing on what to narrow in on. So those are just some things that we'll be covering. And then some other takeaways will be better understanding of how to organize goals into the grant application, as I just mentioned, and how to capitalize on what you already have. So those are some of the bigger ones as well. And then Beth's going to go into the legal requirements. We'll talk a little bit about what the NEA does. So as you probably know, we are the federal agency that funds the arts across the country in every state and territory, every congressional district. We award more than $115 million each year. So my office is the Office of Accessibility. We're the technical assistance and advocacy arm of the agency to make the arts accessible for people with disabilities, older adults, veterans, and people living in institutional settings. So beyond disability to include these other groups as well. And there is a lot of overlap. So just a little bit about our legal requirements. If you receive funding from the NEA, you must comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, Title II for state and local government agencies, and Title III for places of public accommodation and services that can include museums, performing arts facilities, et cetera. But in addition to that, there are additional requirements under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in programs conducted by federal agencies, such as what we do, our Jazzmasters, our National Heritage Awards, any of our programs, and then also those receiving federal financial assistance. So it's our grantees. So anything that you do with our money has to be done in an accessible way and in accessible facilities. So a little bit about our grants. We support a range of artistic disciplines, including artists' communities, arts education, performing arts, folk and traditional arts, literature, museums, and media arts and visual arts. And who may apply? Arts organizations, and it must be a 501c3, arts service organizations, local arts agencies, other state and local governments, school districts, but not individual schools, colleges and universities, federally recognized travel communities, and other nonprofit organizations. We do not fund general operating support, individuals, individual schools, facility construction. So that's one thing with a lot of federal agencies. We do not support capital improvements or construction, or that also includes renovation for accessibility. We don't fund commercial and for-profits, creation of new organizations, academic degrees, re-granting, or projects that are replaced existing in school instruction. But one thing to keep in mind is we do fund equipment purchase, so for audio description equipment, captioning equipment. We do fund accommodations, effective communication, and we recommend that you build that into your application budget. So that we do support the inclusion of sign language interpretation, captioning, and audio descriptions. You just have to make sure you account for that in your budget, and that goes a long way toward ensuring full accessibility. We have four main grants. Our artworks grant, we have two deadlines per year. For all of these, the new guidelines will be coming out in December. We've already passed most of our deadlines for this year, so keep an eye out in December. We'll get our new guidelines. So Artworks is our main grant. It's between $10,000 and $100,000. So the deadlines will be probably in February and July, so check back about that. We do fund research, and we have usually one opportunity per year for that. Challenge America, I know many organizations have applied under that because it targets underserved populations. And there's a flat grant amount of $10,000 for that. And our town, which is our creative place-making grant, which partners civic organizations with nonprofit arts organizations. So I will pass it back over to Lauren. We're going to go back and forth a little bit to talk a little bit about some of the grants that we have awarded in the field of accessibility and disability. So when we were putting together this presentation, we thought it's always useful to show how we applied all these grants and some of the different examples that we have. So one of them is the Art Mobile of Montana, which is our artworks and visual arts $15,000 matching grant. So this is a youth arts education program that go around to different schools and settings in Montana. And they are basically bringing the art to different settings. So what I liked about this also was that when I spoke to them on the phone and asking about how they start applying things for, you know, when they are visiting groups, maybe where there is a specific need, whether they're visiting students who are deaf or maybe blind, how that they can accommodate in that sense. So this is where certain programs, I used to work at a museum also, is when you have certain requests for people with disabilities, how you can apply them. So this is just another example of where to keep in mind to budget in for that. So they have worked with different sign language interpreters when it's needed or different, this is an example of performance artwork that was more tactile. So those are all things to keep in mind when you're doing these type of grants as well or what you can be doing with your programs. The gestures program at the University of St. Francis, we're going to be hearing more from one of our INA grantees, Allison Ballard, about just to give you a little bit of background. They provide weekly instruction to their students who have intellectual and developmental disabilities, which culminates in a big original presentation or performance at the end. And I'm going to have Allison speak to you more about that, but this is just an example of how different programs can be working with students with disabilities as well. And they work with different professional teaching artists. Spring Awakening, I know Beth is going to want to talk to you more about that. Deaf West Theater is an INA grantee as well. They've received, this performance received Tony nominations this year. So another example of some of the funds we're going to hire is for funding. Thinking Beyond Accessibility. So as I was mentioning before, what can you be doing that doesn't require much more funding, whether it's providing large print or taxable opportunities. You can even, for example, for some performances, there are more sensory friendly things that you could be doing or behind the scenes things that you can be offering to your audience members to make it more so that they can access it in different ways. That is an example of the Flint Center in Vermont. They do behind the scenes tours for people who are blind or request other things as accommodations as well. So that is something to keep in mind before you start going to more funding options. And then also what are the needs of the community? And that was also a reason why I'll look forward to Allison speaking with you is because they did that assessment to find out what was needed so that they knew who that, what requests, what accommodations that they could. Be answering in that regard. So and then also talk to local chapters for people who are deaf and who are blind and find out what the needs are and then collaborate and then once you know what you're doing just promote and continue building those partnerships switch here. So I just want to mention a few of the resources. We have a list of our regional and state arts agency coordinators arts.gov forward slash partners forward slash state dash regional. We there's also the National Arts and Disability Center that they have been a partner of ours on several initiatives including the online policy dialogue. Regional ADA centers we've I'm sure you're all aware of them the the 10 regional centers around the country that's ADA TA dot org. And also the job accommodation network we've done a lot of work with them over the years on accommodations in the workplace which can also translate into other types of accommodations for organizations that's ask Jan.org. So I just wanted to say a couple more things. I did. I missed the opportunity to describe a couple of slides. We had earlier a picture of two dancers from Access Dance Company and we have funded them throughout the years to physically integrated dance company in Oakland. A photo from a production of tribes a play written about family with a deaf son by the studio theater in Washington D.C. And also a photo of the Blind Boys of Alabama which was a group that won our National Heritage Awards several years ago. So I just wanted to point that out. And before we move on I'll put up our slide with our contact information. Our general number is 202-682-5532. Our email is accessibility at arts.gov. Our website this is always harder to spell out but arts.gov forward slash artistic hyphen fields forward slash accessibility. I'd be happy to give that to you slower afterward if you'd like. Also the PowerPoint should be up on the website or on the guidebook. So before we move on I just want to ask those who are in the room who are state arts agency representatives. I would like each of you to stand up and wave your hands. I'd like to introduce you just briefly so that if there's anyone else in the room from your state you can reach out to them to ask questions about funding. You can do that at the end of today or if you see them in the conference. So if you wouldn't mind standing up I think you're off. Sorry. And the regional arts organizations. So I'm just going to point, so I'm trying to do this in a way that everyone can see where everyone is from. So we have Nebraska, this is a test for me. Nebraska, Minnesota, Tennessee, South Carolina over on the your right of the of the wall. And if I keep going, what would be counterclockwise for you? I'm sorry what's your name? I'm representing from Massachusetts. I'm not going to ask everyone's names and I'll probably get them all wrong. And coming toward the front we have Ohio and Illinois. And then toward the back we have another Massachusetts, Charles who's speaking a few times. In the back of my eyes, I can't see. Montana. Montana, welcome. Thank you for coming. West Staff, so basically in the middle of the room, Western Arts Federation is her first time here. And then as we head toward the left, your left side of the room we have Oklahoma and then Amy from Minnesota who's going to be speaking. And then toward the back to your left is Idaho. And I'm sorry I'm not saying anyone's names but you can go introduce yourselves. And did I just say anybody? Yeah, so Amy's going to be talking a little bit about what State Arts Agency does and what? And Pennsylvania. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Yes, yes, Minnesota popped into my head. So I'd like to welcome Amy up here. She is the Director of Deputy Director for Administration at the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and also serves as an accessibility coordinator. And most of the folks here in the room are the accessibility coordinators for their states. We do have some extra folks here including four from Ohio which is thrilling. So I'd like to invite Amy up here to talk a bit about what she does. Thank you. I don't have any slides today so but I do have a lot of handouts that I will have up here at the table for you, especially if you are from Pennsylvania. So I have a couple questions before I start. So who in here either works for an arts organization or arts program in Pennsylvania or as an individual artist in Pennsylvania? Okay, great. And out of that group, how many of you do not receive Pennsylvania Council on the Arts funding? So everybody who's here from Pennsylvania receives PCA funds. That's awesome. Wow. I don't really need to say much. Yes, you're welcome. Thank you. Well, we actually don't have a specific pool of funds for accessibility. We did at one point and it was really a temporary program anyway because we really felt like organizations needed to incorporate accessibility into their overall budgets and funding. Primarily the funds that we do is general operating support. But just to let you know of the importance of accessibility in our agency, most of our programs have three criteria that they are reviewed and questions are tailored to these three criteria. One is artistic quality, one is management, and the other one is access. So all of our grantees are reviewed based on those three criteria. And access specifically states demonstrated results in reaching underserved communities, as the applicant defines it, evidence of provision of services or accommodations for people with disabilities. So not only do our applicants answer questions based on that criteria, we also review them or our panels review them based on those three criteria. So it is a very important component of all of the applications that we receive and review with the PCA. So by doing this, I think we encourage our applicants to include people with disabilities as audience members and artists by asking questions. We do have a couple of funding opportunities, which most of you already know about, but the one that you probably, you may or may not know about that is professional development and consulting. And this program is now done through Citizens for the Arts in Pennsylvania, and this program can help you bring in consultants, and it's specifically stated in the guidelines to evaluate and plan to make facilities, programs, and staff accessible to people with disabilities. And any of our grantees that are already getting funds from the PCA, whether it's directly or through a partner, is eligible to apply for these funds. The other categories in that are peer-to-peer consultations. So if you are an organization that has a peer at another similar organization and you would like to go visit them and see their accessible programming, you can apply for funds to travel to that organization, even if it's not in Pennsylvania, to get some feedback and information from them. This program also provides travel to conferences like this one. So you can apply to the program up to $500 a person to attend conferences, arts conferences like this one or any others, but specifically today you could have applied to fund yourself to come here, at least a little bit. I know, realize that some of these have limitations. This program, professional development and consulting funds up to $2,000 for consultations, $500 for conferences, and then the last component of this is busing, which I think is pretty important to get audiences with disabilities to your events. Many times one of the barriers to participate in arts activities and events for people with disabilities is transportation. And you could apply to this program to fund accessible transportation up to $250. And again, any applicant can apply to this on a current grantee. The one, the other area that we have is our arts and education program. The things for accessibility with this is if you are an artist at this conference or an artist with a disability or not without a disability, you can become a rostered artist to go into any educational settings. A lot of what is funded and done is residencies at schools, but it can also be any educational facility like senior centers, prisons, veteran homes and hospitals, anything like that. Also as an arts organization, you can bring some of these rostered artists into your arts organization or facility for a residency, and maybe you want to work with them to start including people with disabilities into your programs that are not currently participating. And we have partners all across the state and our arts and education partners do the rostering for us and they make sure that any artist going into any kind of setting, whether it's a hospital, a senior center, a school, is not only trained to be in that kind of setting, but also is trained to work with the populations that they will be working with. So it's important for you to know that because I know sometimes artists are just put in places and maybe not have experience with that population and we make sure that it happens. And again, arts and education program, you're also eligible, if you're a current grantee, you're also eligible to apply to this program for additional funding. And then I'm not going to get into the other programs because they're already grantee so I don't need to talk about the other programs because you're already applying to them. So like I said, I have a lot of handouts on the things I talked about today. And one of the things, one of my goals for this conference was to come here and start getting a more defined role and plan for accessibility in the arts for Pennsylvania. I've been doing this work for a long time, but between me leaving and coming back and a lot of changes in the field, there's really no defined role for the PCA. We do do some wonderful projects that are kind of, we grab them as we can, we're doing some creative aging projects and some projects with veterans. But I'm definitely open to talking to anybody about any ideas you have, whether the PCA should be a cheerleader or resource surveys, establishing peer networks. So I'm very open to that. Of course, a realistic role for us too would be great. Because I see the great things that the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council is doing, which we're going to hear from next, and I'm extremely proud and jealous of what she and is doing in Pittsburgh. So I would love to hear any ideas you might have for the PCA's role. Thank you so much, Amy. You guys have been a really good partner in this work and I look forward to continuing to working with PCA and with all the states. Just as a reminder, 40% of the NEA's budget goes to the states. So it kind of trickles our funding down. And then any of the funds that go down to an arts organization that comes from us through the State Arts Agency, the 504 requirements are triggered as well. So I rely on our network of accessibility coordinators in the states to help us with this. So thank you for talking a little bit about what you do and feel free to reach out to your State Arts Agency if you're not in Pennsylvania to see types of programs that they have. So I'd like to invite Anne up here. The theme throughout this is funding, programs that the NEA has funded, and we have worked with the Pittsburgh Arts Council to work on these issues. So I'd like to have Anne talk a little bit about what she does and I'll switch her slides over. And welcome to Pittsburgh. We are thrilled that you are here and we are thrilled that you are going to see the result of five years of work in January of 2011. We at the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council began a holistic initiative to increase access to the arts for people with disabilities. I'm going to take a moment to talk about a few of my slides. The Pittsburgh Glass Center about a year and a half ago had this incredible exhibit which was a whole bunch of letters from neon signs that a neon sign repair guy had collected over the years. And what he did was he installed and they're all different fonts and all different colors and he installed LED lights behind them. And then these, what the picture that's up here now is the word access spelled out in these lit up letters because what they did was they attached ropes on them and they hung them on pegs on the back of the wall. And so several of my slides are from that because they let me in early and I took a whole bunch of access related slides to make my slide presentations pretty. And so this is the exhibit was called ABC at PCG by Jeremy Burt. So the next slide is a definition of sort of what our work is and we call it increasing accessibility in Pittsburgh arts and culture and it's a comprehensive initiative designed to provide arts organizations with the knowledge and skills to welcome people with disabilities as patrons, volunteers, employees and artists. Now I want to take a moment to point out what this means. When we say welcome people with disabilities, we are not talking compliance. We are talking, making those people, every person with a disability should be able to walk in to any regional or any organization in the 10 county region of southwestern Pennsylvania and feel like they're just another person coming. They should be able to walk in. It should be a seamless period. That's our goal and we have done a lot to get there. Of course it's not perfect. I know because my background is actually in disability advocacy and not art. So I came to this job as the bridge, right? And so all my friends in the disability community do not hesitate to call, text, email, post, send me a Facebook message when they have a bad experience because what my job is in GPAC is I am the glue. I am the person that people call when they're stuck, when they have a customer service issue they call. I sort of have my fingers in all the pies. I help organizations of all disciplines, of all sizes. I help individual artists. And what I'm going to talk about now is all the different components of this sort of holistic support. Okay. So basically the next slide is all the different components. So since January of 2011, we have presented 28 accessibility workshops. That's in five years, right? 28, that's a lot. We have had over 105 local organizations participate. We have had 609 attendees at these things. Every single presentation we do, every single workshop is either presented solely by a person with a disability or has a person with a disability as a presenter. Because what we, and by the way almost every single workshop is a lunch and learn where we feed people. Because what we have learned, and this sounds really silly, is that people have to eat lunch and they don't have any trouble getting their boss to say, hey, can I go pay $15 to go to this workshop or I'm going to get lunch and I'm going to learn about accessibility? Sometimes they have to come early in the morning or leave earlier in the afternoon. It seems suspicious. But if they're going at lunch, even if they don't have institutional support, they can go, right? So, as you can see, we've had at least 34. Now, here's the other component. This is where sort of funding comes in. Since 2012, we've been providing scholarships to the LEED conference. We've had over 80 people from Pittsburgh go to LEED conferences in four years. That doesn't actually, I don't think that includes the current number. I'm not sure. Because we had $7,000 in scholarships to give away this year to people in the city, so we didn't have to pay for travel. So we had people go into all sorts of things. There are a lot of us here. And there are a lot of people who are switching their registration. So the marketing person can go to a marketing thing. The evaluation person can go, like, David from our office is here. Raise your hand, David. He's our guru of research and evaluation and advocacy, right? So we're trying to get all the right people here from the different organizations. Now, also, the other key is our Access Peer Group. Our Access Peer Group started as five people, and now it's like over a hundred, right? We usually have about 25 to 30 people at every peer meeting, which a quarterly or as needed, to get ready for LEED, we had a lot more. But this is a group of people who get together and share everything, right? So one of the results of this has been we have developed a tremendous expertise in sensory-friendly and relaxed rules and performances. We have small, we have the ballet, the symphony, and the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust through their Broadway series, Allergy Sensory-Friendly Events. The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust does a sensory-friendly gallery call called an art barge. In our Pittsburgh International Children's Festival, they commissioned an immersive theater experience for children with autism spectrum disorders, right? There are, at the Three Overs Arts Festival, there are sensory break stations, which is a huge arts festival. A thousand people come, we're no more than that. And every year, and so what's happened is that the people in our community, people with disabilities in our community, now have very high expectations of our arts organizations. In five years, we went from people with disabilities being problems to being just patrons, right? But if we, so if we move on to the next slide, basically we improved inclusion of people with disabilities as patrons and participants on a regional scale. But the work that, and I'm going to give you examples of sort of what we do in the next slide, we have our workshops, and then we try to do different things. For example, this is a photograph, and it is taken in the Human Engineering Research Laboratory of the University of Pittsburgh, and we call it our Assistive Technology Field Trip, right? And what you see is you see a young man who's a graduate student, and he is speaking to a circle of women, who are here, you'll probably recognize the back of their heads at some point, and he's sitting in a room that has a really high tech wheelchair in it and a whole bunch of computer screens, but the Human Engineering Research Laboratory is a place where a whole bunch of PhD students, many of whom have disabilities, are solving their own technology problems. For example, if you have a high spinal cord injury, you often can't actually use a debit card and a Mac machine, right? So one of the things that they were trying to do is they were trying to figure out a way to make it easy for someone with limited manual dexterity to use it. They also had trouble trying to figure out how people with disabilities can weigh themselves with some regularities, so one of the things that they showed us was this bed where they basically had set it on four scales, they were experimenting with it, but what this did, what this particular workshop did, was it gave a window into what it's like to live with a disability in a different way than you normally would see, and that allowed a lot of the arts, like 35, 40 people there, and then we all had pizza and beer afterwards, we brought in pizza and beer, never underestimate the value of food and drink for these things, because what really has happened here, as we have all of us arts managers have, and all of us artists have friends, our advisory committee is not an advisory committee anymore, they are friends, right? Our friends come to these things, our friends come to our parties at our homes, our friends come to our events, right? And so there's a lot of, hmm, Brian would hate this. Brian used to be a costume designer, still is a costume designer, he lost his sight to a stroke a few years ago, he remembers the choreography of every musical he's ever seen, and he'll be sitting there going, that audio describer was terrible, she completely missed this part, and I'm like happy to tell, he goes, I know this choreography, and she missed it. I'm like, I'll point it out. You know, but these were our friends, right, and when they can communicate with you, and know you listen, they do. All right, so that's one of, that's an example of one of our field trips. The next slide is, we have a very interesting funding opportunity, we call it the Access Micro Fund, because what we realized is, if you get a person who's committed to accessibility at their organization, but the bosses don't get it, they can't find a way to actually offer programmatic accommodations easily, so this is a very small reimbursement for up to $500 for someone who wants to try your description, ASL interpretation, or card. So when you send these things out into the ether, you never know what you're going to get, so this particular one was a reimbursement that was given to a program called Start With Art, and Start With Art is a local artist. This funding is available to informal collaborators, individual artists, arts organizations, you don't have to be a 501c3, so this young man, young man, Matt Conboy is a former Iraqi veteran and a photographer, and he decided that his goal in life was to start every baby who's born in Allegheny County as an art collector, so he had some of the best artists in our region take one photograph, and he prints it off at every baby born at the biggest hospitals in our, goes home with one of these photographs, and they're stunning as you can see, but he, Matt and I are friends, we come into our things and it occurs to him one day, oh my god, if a baby's born without sight, what is this going to do? So he hired a local writer to audio describe every photograph, and he posts podcasts on their website, right? I would never have thought of that as being something that was important, but you know, it's sort of like you throw these things out into the ether and you provide people with the ability to accommodate people as they see fit. There was a very long process to this decision because he originally said, well, I'll do a tactile map, and then I'll do this, and I'm like, Matt, just have someone to audio describe it, right? So we also have the Arts Access Data Project, which is difficult, it has not gone off the ground, we spent years trying to figure out how to gather specific data, right? Okay, great. So what we're trying to do is gather all this data through Survey Monkey, and it's been, I'm not going to talk too much about it because it's complicated, it's not working as well as we had hoped it would, but my role is sort of to look at this and try to figure out how to quantify the work we're doing. We know that it's working, we've been asking the same basic questions for five years now and we know it's going really well, and in my head I have a lot of stuff in there, but I can't quantify that. So the other thing, all right, and this is the thing that is most important to me is we provide technical support because as our organizations become more sophisticated, we always have a need for basics. We always have basic one-on-one workshops available to everyone. Our next slide, people get stuck. They always get stuck, and what I've realized is that when people get stuck at some point, unless they can call and ask a question and get an answer, they stay stuck, right? So I'm the answer person, right? So part of our technical support is that we, you know, anybody has a problem, they call me, so once I get this phone call from Brickalive, which is our immersion theater company, I need you to give me six blind actors. And I'm like, dick, there are six blind actors here. And I can give you six people who are really, who are blind, who will stand up and say anything in front of people, but I can't give you six blind actors. And then I said, hey, so do you want someone who was born without sight? Or do you want someone who lost their sight? All of a sudden I could see his mind go pshhhh and blow up. And I'm sorry, I haven't been describing the size. What I was talking about before was of a Bhutanese temple that I was talking about. The start with art slide, this particular one shows the end result of that conversation, which was an immersive theater piece that explored the experience of being blind. It's called OPEL. It's about 20 minutes into this process. What you see in the the picture here is a participant in the immersive theater production who's wearing a pair of completely light blocking goggles, right? So you came in sets of four groups. It was set up as sort of a travel a travel agency. And at the center of this immersive theater piece were two blind actors, one who had lost your sight and one who would never have sight. And the whole process was sort of nicking you experience what it's like to lose, to not have sight. Now, being in this accessibility field, I have been to countless workshops where people have said to me, oh, close your eyes and imagine what it's like not to have sight and play out and go into a theater experience. It was nothing compared to this. We went outside in the rain. Funniest part was at some point you had to use a payphone and I had my children who were 12 and 14 at the time and they didn't even know what a payphone was. I remember seeing them with a quarter looking at the thing going, why do we do this? Because they have cell phones. But we went outside. We went outside in the rain. We went outside with other people. We were, the most important part was they duplicated what it's like to go to a party. So personally I was taken and asked to hold somebody's drink while they were off to do something and left there for 10 minutes. My son was sat down next to a table and said, hey, there's a jigsaw puzzle here. Have fun. My daughter was sat down at a note table and said there's popcorn right over here. And they had to figure out all these things. They'd go to its leg, all my friends were blind and had experiences like this. It was fascinating. I went to California as the centerpiece production and was sold out. Okay, so I'm moving on. Sorry, I can talk forever about this. Next one in terms of technical support. The photograph up here is in a glass glowing demonstration with an ASL interpreter doing the sign for glass glowing, which is basically mimicking glass glowing. So this was a group that had wanted to have ASL interpretation at their monthly glass glowing demonstration, but they weren't sure how to do it. So I went and I did training because the staff was a little hesitant. And what ended up happening is they had like 35, 40 people who were deaf there. They just posted it once on our deaf events listserv and people showed up. They've been doing it ever since. And for everyone who wants to know the pictures of what they made, which was it was right before Easter and it's a Tyrannosaurus Rex coming out of an egg with a bunny in its mouth. So the other thing that I am most proud about quite frankly, move up to me down three slides is working with artists with disabilities. And I have this slide up here that's ability in the light of letters. So if we go down to the next one, I want to talk a little bit about the impact on people with disabilities in our community because what has happened is we've provided people with opportunities for creative expression. The images up here are of an improvisational dance piece by French director Pascal Rombair called a micro history of world economics danced. We had 34 members of our disability community. We had young people who were deaf, three people who were blind. I ended up performing because they needed sighted guides. I don't perform, it's bizarre for me. But what the picture on what we have now is we have one picture of the performance with a mother who has a facial disfigurement. Basically the right side of her face looks as if it's melted. And she was with her son and during the course of our two weeks of intensive rehearsals the mother said, people often cross the street when I'm walking down the street with my son because they don't want to be near me. And suddenly she had to put herself on a stage and she had to offer herself up as something beautiful. You know what's happened to her ever since? She, her Facebook picture which used to be something other than her is regularly her face. And she has become an advocate posting things about people with disfigurement. But the best one is the next slide. The next slide is a picture of a young man named Dennis. And he's an authority. This young man has an autism spectrum disorder and that's his mother Cheryl. And that was on the very first day when they had a photographer take portraits. And what the pictures are, there are two pictures first is my favorite young man sitting there looking absolutely terrified. His hands around his knees, his facial expression is blank, his mother has a plaza around him and is kissing him on the cheek. In the picture right next to it she literally has her fingers on the side of his mouth pushing his mouth up into a smile. Right? That was at the beginning day one. If you look at the next slide here he is performing and he is performing on the stage with 50 other people. We are all wearing street clothes. There's a person in a wheelchair next to him. And he is smiling from ear to ear. He is intense and he is focused. Now I deliberately never spoke to him. I never one, I didn't want to stress him out. After our first performance he ran up to me, looked at me in the face and said, it was amazing. I had the best time. Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. And I'm looking at him like, you didn't say a word for two weeks. Where did this come from? And here's the next picture which is my favorite. He now, he is sitting, he has his head on the shoulder of the director. He has smushed into this picture with the cast. He didn't want anyone to touch him the first day. Ever since then he has said to his mom, when are we going to do it again? When are we going to do it again? Because he also got paid. We made sure everybody got paid. He really wants another paycheck. But what I've found is this sign says art. What I have found is that art and the opportunity for creative expression for people with disabilities is the most powerful bit of advocacy we can do. People with disabilities, people don't want to hear what they have to say a lot of the times they don't have given the opportunity for creative expression and get great feedback for it. They can put themselves on a stage being powerful and positive it changes lives. Right? We need to talk, we have to have more artists with disabilities on our stages. We have to have more people with disabilities and their voices being heard. Because if we don't, they're always going to be in the shadows. Right? So we have gotten every year a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and the local foundation called FISA Foundation. That funds our workshops. It funds bringing in our speakers. It funds part of my salary. It funds all of our funding programs relating to disability as well. I am also the grant maker and so I re-grant money for the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. What I also do is I include people with disabilities on my grant panels. And it changes what we fund as well because it's not accessible to me because I'm deaf. And why should I fund that? Because you know you're not doing what we need to do. So I encourage everyone in this room to serve on as many grant panels as you can and advocate for disability. So thank you. Sorry. Thank you Ann. And then finally I'd like to introduce Alison Baller who is the director of the gestures program and we're going to put up that slide in the background to reference it. University of St. Francis and Fort Wayne, Indiana. So I will allow her to speak about her experiences with the program and accessibility. Hello I am Alison Baller. My program is called the gestures program. I don't want you to know I inherited that title. I find it somewhat offensive and we're working on changing it. It's one of our goals this year. The gestures program is a performing arts group of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The program was founded in 1978 and I became the director in 2008. When I became the director the first thing I did was just sort of assess what was happening. There were 35 people in the program at that time. They were ranged in age from teens to adults and when I took the program on it had its own unique history of how it operated and what it did. The group would meet weekly and they would do arts activities performing arts activities and they would then present an original performance in the spring. The first year like I said I didn't do a lot of changes I just wanted to kind of figure out what was going on. I did however and this is an important piece because Lauren has asked me to speak to how I developed the infrastructure of the program which is in a position where we were eligible for grant funding and the most recently funding from the NEA. I did ask for a program budget which I thought was completely reasonable and my boss laughed and I thought uh oh this isn't good this program has existed for 20 some years and I need to know if I can buy music, can I buy floor tape can I what can I do so he said there is not a program budget just know that you don't really have much money so in an effort to quantify that so we were all on the same page I created a program budget and I was working with a very small team of volunteers many of whom were not artists so they didn't have specific skill sets and uh we just made it work that first year I would facilitate participants through various activities in theater arts dance, storytelling music and we just kind of made it work so the second year I said it's time that we ask ourselves what the next step is as a program, as a project keeping in mind we were part of a university part of a university many of whom did not even know we existed because we served people from the community and not students within the university so as a background in arts administration and with a background as an artist I started going out in my community and asking various stakeholders what do you feel the needs are for people with developmental disabilities in particular but people with disabilities in general and our community when it comes to arts programming and it was interesting what I found out it wasn't really surprising they said basically they need access they need opportunities and they need an opportunity to showcase their abilities and what they can do well I could have said in my office and kind of figured that out but it was really important that I went and talked to people and got their opinions about what was needed so I took that information back to the university I talked to my boss about it and we asked ourselves how can we make sure we structure our program to address those specific needs and then my next question was how can we make sure our program addresses the mission of the university since we were a university program and the university's mission was to serve and develop students so I started talking to department heads and asking them if they were aware of the gestures program and many of them were not which I found horrifying and asking them how our program could serve their students it seemed to me it was a great opportunity right there on campus for their students to get hands on service learning which was a huge priority within the university so when I started my second year there were these other pieces in place that enabled us to just have a better idea of who we are and what we were striving to achieve I called forth committee of community stakeholders so that we could talk about this information that we had gathered and ask ourselves now what do we do with this information we created yet another budget this was now year two that we had a program budget which was very exciting and we looked at what it was going to cost us to develop our program and then I thought well before we start asking for money from the state and from the federal government we should look at our local funding base as a professional grant proposal writer it made sense to me that we needed to start really locally so we approached the local funder and we talked about what we were doing and we got them interested in our program we submitted a grant and we received $25,000 which was really exciting it's not going to change the world but it certainly gave me some resources to work with and then in exchange for that first year's grant we agreed and this was actually a suggestion I made that we start as strategic planning process so that we would develop a three year strategic plan to make sure we were all on the same page my concern was if I had vision and was moving forward and the university at large was not aware of my vision or it didn't have I into my vision that I could end up creating a program that was really solid and could get all kinds of funding but wasn't really supported by the university so we started a strategic planning process that was spearheaded by the vice president of the university so there was buy-in on that process and the final product from a high level of executive leadership that process took about three months and we ended up with a three year strategic plan and then it was a matter of implementing that plan and continuing to revive that plan as things changed as this process of infrastructure development was continuing I was also making changes in our service delivery as a multimedia interdisciplinary performance artist it was really important to me that we provide a range of artistic opportunities to our participants and that we really engage them as artists and we really taught them artistic skills and so I started now that I had a little bit of money hiring a professional team of teaching artists instead of working with volunteers without specific skill sets in the process what happened was our participant population grew exponentially and now instead of working with 35 people this past year our program served 80 people it has continued growing exponentially year to year and we do that with no marketing word of mouth because these services are so desired in our community so as we continue growing as we continue developing our artist team I suddenly thought what's going to happen when we are no longer here doing this who's going to be doing this work and it became incredibly important to me that we engage our student body and provide training opportunities to the student body that was right there at the university so we now bring students to assist our professional teaching artists and every service delivery hour is a training hour and that has become incredibly important with the money from the NEA we are now also hiring people with intellectual and developmental disabilities to join those teams of professional teaching artists student assistant and now people with intellectual and developmental disabilities so creating a really strong team our people to gain new skills in many different ways not just in the arts the other thing that became really important to me was that we continue building our capacity 80 people is a lot of people 80 people with developmental disabilities to serve over a two to four hour period on a Saturday morning is a lot of people to engage and I'm not sure we can really accommodate too many more although I refuse to tell them that they can't participate so now training and replicability has become another important part of our program and we are going to service providers outside of our immediate area within close geographic jurisdiction and working with their staff teams to teach them to do this kind of programming so that we can ensure that the opportunities continue being available to other people with disabilities who cannot participate in our program so I think that's it in a nutshell and I'm just so pleased to have the opportunity to talk to you about the work the only other thing I want to say is that I feel like as the director of this program my primary job is to hold great vision to hold great vision for what is possible for what is possible for my participants for what is possible for my team and for what is possible for my community and then I have to sell that vision and I have to frame that vision in a way that makes it achievable but I encourage you all to hold vision for whatever groups you're working with thank you you provide a wonderful example of the type of things the type of programs that are out there that are serving people with disabilities the type of things that the NEA funds and you have a great example of taking a program and building it up to the point where you can apply for funding for you know from different sources so it was great, thank you so much I'd like to take a moment to take advantage of the fact that we're being live cast by HowlRounds to mention that we partnered with HowlRounds in January to host a round table on creating opportunities for deaf theater artists we held that in New York in January and HowlRound helped us develop the final report which I have in my hands it's a beautiful colorful photo featuring several of the young women from the cast of Spring Awakening which we funded through Deaf West Theater they were able to take that play to Broadway last year and yeah, yes, yes so I wanted to mention that this round table is now available on our website under our publications on our website if you go to the top there's a tab for publications and it's one of the most recent ones so it should be toward the top so it was a wonderful opportunity and there is going to be a session on Saturday actually I'll hand the microphone to Anne and she can describe it because the director of Deaf West Theater the artistic director, DJ Kurz actually I'm going to be interviewing him to talk about the development because Deaf West Theater is theater that it incorporates deaf and hearing actors takes existing plays and recasts them in a way which is beautiful where you have deaf artists playing the roles with hearing artists speaking the roles or singing the roles they're double cats they did a lovely job with spring awakening on Broadway so I'll let Anne talk about the session on Saturday so on Saturday for those of you who can stay or have a later in the day flight we have an all day capacity building workshop on supporting artists with disabilities and we have Beth has kind of agreed to interview DJ Kurz about their experience on Broadway with spring awakening so in case you missed that they had two actors playing the same role at the same time anybody who can manage egos like that needs to be listened to but we also have people who are going to take spear company basically large and small arts organizations of all disciplines and the artists with disabilities with whom they worked and they're going to be interviews and that's on Saturday and also Thursday night a performance three artists with disabilities tickets are $25 that's going to blow your minds and if you walk or roll down Penn Avenue we also have a gallery 709 has a juried exhibition of art by artists with disabilities complete with tactile representations of the arts and audio description of it it's important to incorporate to include people with disabilities in your work yes what we do is to make the arts accessible to people with disabilities but you need to have people with disabilities on stage making the art and advising you on the type of work that's being done so we have 10 minutes or a little less to if anyone has any questions for any of our speakers on any of the topics that we've covered test test okay we have someone over there I think this question would be from for Amy hey I just wanted to ask you about I think you said that there were three criteria that you all used I think the first one was about artistic quality and one of the things I guess I've seen in our community is especially artistic quality is seen as sometimes a barrier actually from some arts organizations especially in communities of color or cultural organizations because some people kind of look at artistic quality as this you know this in one way, in a traditional way whereas a cultural organization may look at it I guess in a different way so the question is how do you all educate like your advisory panels or people in decision making that artistic quality is not just this one standard but can be seen as more of a broad based way of looking at things well I think the most important thing to do is to diversify your panel in every way possible geographically, ethnically ability discipline so that you have all those voices at the table so if something is not to a particular person's taste another person can chime in and say I have experience of that you know this is high quality or maybe they'll agree that it's not high quality we also always emphasize that it's not about taste it's about the artistic product and staff will oftentimes say that during panel meetings because we don't allow that to come into the discussion and we also that's why we have three different criteria somebody may do very well in artistic quality but not so well in access and that's a broad, access can be very broad in terms of education disability geography, anything like that and you know the other is the same they could also do very good in access and perhaps their artistic quality is not what is equitable is the access so it kind of balances itself out too and that's how we deal with it and I'd just like to take on that with the NEA we make sure that all of our panels have a high level of diversity I work to help to make sure that we have people with disabilities on the panels we recently had a deaf panelist on one of them and our criteria are artistic excellence and artistic merit and the merit part comes in to how well are you serving your community how is the program being managed so that comes into effect and we also recommend that if you are applying to submit high quality work samples so make sure high resolution photos not just a scan of a photo or a newspaper clipping in high quality videos so we encourage you to make sure that you have that quality in your applications Hello I was described earlier as a research guru so I worry about research questions and I'm wondering I mean I read a lot of reports as you imagine about funding trends public private funds etc etc at the federal state and local level but unless I'm missing something I don't see a lot of actual data about trends with arts and disability in terms of funding is anybody collecting that is anybody tracking that and if so what are the trends perhaps I'm looking around to see if anyone has any ideas and examples the NEA has not been tracking that we recently collected data on arts participation for people with disabilities that's different and we found that the numbers were definitely lower in population but not as extreme as we thought it might be but we're not tracking that at this point does anyone have any other is anyone aware of any other group that's doing that got someone back there I'm just going to offer a cautionary tale to anyone who presents the arts or whatever in any way it's been about 8 years ago that our institution had a complaint about non-compliance with accessibility in retrospect it's a little bit ridiculous from the beginning because one of our original board members had written the book on ADA compliance in universities and we were very keen about being accessible for a long time before but this was a particular situation where we were for a single year outside of our normal venue and the complaint was in connection with that happily for us not only have we always been involved with accessibility but we had also done the 504 workbook at some point and had that and we were on the campus of the nation's largest university Ohio State University whose ADA compliance officer is a national expert in ADA accessibility this individual who had a grudge against the university for reasons that don't matter took his complaint not just to the Greater Columbus Arts Council but to the Attorney General's office to the State's office to the Ohio Arts Council probably two or three things in between and to the ADA very fortunately for us we had a history of being sensitive to these things from the very beginning we had an expert who was able to articulate all of the reasons that the facility was accessible and so on on the line but it took essentially a year and an incredible amount of time to get this resolved at every level saying no there is no validity to this complaint so I would just urge that people maybe do a little extra precautionary work and fill out that work book and have that which increases your sensitivity about how tall the seats have to be in the bathrooms all of the other minutiae and second of all it wouldn't hurt to find a local expert in accessibility to come and take a look at your facility and say there's an inch threshold here or whatever that might be an impediment to people and finally this individual offered to withdraw the complaint if we would provide six lifetime seats to our series and recordings of all the artists that appeared on the series in various other ways which took some of the hand out of sales but maybe the last it was a difficult experience we want to thank you for that contribution I know about three more minutes are there any other questions Lisa Mike's coming behind you for those of us involved in autism friendly sensory friendly relaxed performance programming is there any funding available to study the impact on the person with autism or other developmental cognitive disabilities or sensory sensitivities over a period of time attending performances with his or her family it's something we have always wanted to talk about doing but it just hasn't quite happened so is there funding out there to do that we all know anecdotally the impact but I would love your advice if you have a funding opportunity coming up I just don't have another deadline on me it's a refund research on anything across the spectrum with the arts whether it's effect on the individual education childhood development arts on older adults we've funded research projects across the board but we do recommend that you partner with the university or recognize research institution because you usually do need to partner with researchers and it makes for a more eligible application if you partner so there is that opportunity and if you check our website there's a tab at the top for grants you drop down and you can see the opportunity for research and you can have the grant every year so that is an opportunity okay one last question hey Beth it's Betsy from North Carolina I'm wondering that report you mentioned about participation amongst people is that available on the site the round table for opportunities for deaf theater artists no no I'm sorry you said there was a report done on the number of people with disabilities participating is that available yes it's in our arts data series if you go to our website there's a field there's a tab for research and toward the bottom right hand corner of the page there are links to arts data profile series and if you look through that and it's under the research tab that's great to know so any of these things I'm mentioning if you want to email me it's accessibilityatarts.gov I'd be happy to send you the direct links for them is the deadline for our research thank you for looking that up for our research grant but I encourage you to look on our website and contact our research office and I just want to remind people to be sure to look for your state arts agency folks here if they're still in the room and they'd be happy to talk with you about the funding opportunities in your states and I'd just like to thank all the panelists for your time and your expertise please fill out your surveys once they're completed you can either drop them at the registration table or on the front table flip them over thank you all so much everybody has a break for another 20 minutes right right