 Major sponsors for Ableton on Air include Green Mountain Support Services, empowering people with disabilities to live home in the community, Washington County Mental Health, where hope and support come 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 Powered Online Newspaper, U.S. Press Corps Domestic and International, Anchor FM and Spotify. Partners for Ableton on Air include the HOD of New York and New England, where everyone belongs, the Orthodox Union, the Division for the Blind and Visually Impaired of Vermont, the Vermont Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired, Center Vermont Habitat for Humanity, and Montpelier Sustainable Coalition, Montefiore Medical Center of the Bronx, Roosevelt Kennedy Center of Bronx, New York, Albert Einstein College of Medicine of the Bronx. Ableton on Air has been seen in the following publications, Park Chester Times, WWW, this is the Bronx.com, New York Powered Online Newspaper, Muslim Community Report, WWW.H.com, and the Montpelier Bridge. Ableton on Air is part of the following organizations, the National Academy of Television, Arts and Sciences, Boston, New England Chapter, and the Society of Professional Journalists. Welcome to this edition of Ableton on Air, the one and only program that focuses on the needs, concerns, and achievements of the differently abled. I've always been your host, Lauren Seiler. Lauren is not here today. We would like to thank our sponsors, Washington County Mental Health, Green Mountain Support Services, and many others, including the association for the, including the partnership from the association for the Blind and Visually Impaired of Vermont, the division for the Blind and Visually Impaired of Vermont, partnerships with Higher Ability Vermont, and all the partnerships from the LBGTQ community in Vermont and beyond. We would like to welcome our guest Elaine Ball, activist and LGBT activist of Vermont, and thank you for joining us on this edition of Ableton on Air. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Tell me the missions and goals of your advocacy and why you're doing it. You know, I'd say the top goal or vision that I have for why I do what I do to support LGBTQ communities, my own community, is for the youth, really. I really, really stand on the shoulders of giants in the LGBT community who have been doing this advocacy work since the 70s and earlier, much earlier, the very first Mattachine Society and organizations for gay and lesbian men and women in the U.S. were started in the 1930s and 40s, but they were very, very small and very, very closeted and didn't really have a lot of, of course, didn't have very much broad support in the community. And so certainly since the 60s, 70s and 80s, as people have been coming out of the closet and really talking more about these issues and who they are and being more openly themselves, my queer elders basically have shown me what it means to, how powerful it can be to come out and be ourselves and how inspirational that can be for the youth. So really a lot of what I do is just in the mind of, with the mindset of I hope this can be helpful for the youth to know that they are beautiful and loved and perfect just the way they are, don't need to change to be accepted by other people, that there's a broad support of community there for them as they grow older and figure themselves out. Now, some statistics. More than one-third of the LGBTQ adults identify as having a disability or a special need. Can you explain some of those statistics and why that is or why some people in the past have been afraid to come out? Absolutely. So there's absolutely a lot of fear within the LGBTQ community about coming out to medical providers. There's a lot of difficulty in finding understanding and compassionate psychiatrists and other medical professionals who understand the difficulties that are very unique to LGBT people. And so because it can be so difficult to even find help when you are having an illness or a disability or a mental health crisis, that just sort of exasperates the issue if you can't find treatment early. And so by the time they're adults, at least within the past couple of years, one in four lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults in California have identified as having a disability. Two in five transgender people in the entire U.S. And there's all sorts of other fairly high statistics compared to the broader population. It's almost double. We mentioned a couple things. Now there's different acronyms, LGBTQ, AI, or IA. What exactly is that? Yeah. And then the second part to this question, you mentioned transgender. Those that don't know in the community that we serve, which is the disability community, what is that word mean and some other words that you might want to mention? Thanks for bringing this up. Particularly within the mental health realm of things, being gay or lesbian was fairly recently considered a disability, was considered a mental health issue. And people were receiving treatments like electroshock therapy, many times conversion therapy, trying to convince them that they were not actually that way. There's been a lot of damage done to the LGBT community over the years in psychology and psychiatry, but those things have changed. The National Institute of Mental Health, NIMH, has done more and more research and studies with the broader population and the LGBT population so that that diagnosis as an illness was taken away. However, currently, gender dysphoria is still considered a mental health disorder. And that really affects transgender people a lot because they're unable to seek medical treatment for medical transitions unless they have very specific psychiatrists giving them permission, basically. So in layman's terms, if someone wanted to become another sex, they would have to get a psychiatrist's permission? Yes, absolutely. A doctor's and a psychiatrist. Many different doctors and psychiatrists have to sort of sign off for those treatments to be allowed, for them to be allowed to be scheduled at all, let alone covered by insurance, and certainly not all insurance covers those treatments. So I think right now in our sort of current time period, being transgender is far, far more difficult than being lesbian or gay or bisexual in terms of getting the care that you need. Now, let's talk about your perseverance and what it took to get you to this point despite your mental illness. If you want to talk about your mental illness, if you can, as slow as you are. Thank you. So I've only recently been diagnosed with bipolar 1 disorder and ADHD and complex PTSD. However, I have had these disorders my entire life. Even though the diagnosis is fairly recent, the effects and symptoms of those illnesses have been with me my whole life. So a lot of the advocacy work I've done, despite facing those challenges, I think is really inspiring. Like I said, my elders as well, people who have come before me have suffered from so much more maltreatment from the medical profession in general and have still persevered as advocates. Whereas in my case, I've been able to get the medical treatment that I need. I've been able to find psychiatrists and psychologists and therapists and doctors, primary care doctors, who are very open and accepting and educated about what it means to be LGBT. So I'm very, very grateful that I live in a time where there are more people who are more understanding in the broader society. Now, are people's families, not necessarily yours, but sometimes families get angry, as you say, or feel differently with people in their family coming out. Absolutely. If I could ask this, you can answer this if you want. If you don't, you don't have to. Has your family been supportive of you, yes or no? Yes, definitely. I've been really, really grateful for the support of all of my parents, my siblings, many people in my family. There are some people in my extended family who have chosen not to support me and not to be a part of my life. I think that's far more common than people realize that their families choose to never speak to them again or to not allow them to be themselves and express themselves as who they really are. They have to hide who they are in order to be included in family gatherings or to be able to be invited into their parents' homes. And it's just an excruciating feeling to feel that you grew up wanting and needing the love of your family and not being able to have that if you choose to be yourself. But why is it that families sometimes speak to one another? Is that a trend or is there a reason behind it? I think with most things in the LGBT community over many, many decades of advocacy there's more and more understanding in communities and families about what it means to be LGBT and that it isn't bad, that it's a difference, like you were saying, we are differently abled. We exist differently in the world, but that doesn't mean that we're evil and in the past we have certainly been seen by many people as just evil, just abnormal and unacceptable. And that is changing. So very, very gratefully, like I said, the advocacy work that I do is really focused on the youth because they are still having a hard time with their families in most cases. So let's go to the youth. What type of work do you do with the youth and how have youth, so obviously we're talking teenagers on up, so how have youth been dealing with it? Because for many years, people that are LGBT have been scared. Yeah, to even come out. Historically, and I'm going to only mention this once, there's been a lot of prejudice around LGBT disabled. There's a horrible word called, they used to call it way back, gay bashing. Yes. Or other types of violence or bullying. Yes, still happens today. Go ahead if you, yeah. Yeah, absolutely, thank you. And I'll just bring up a very recent source spot in our own Vermont queer community where a transgender woman was stabbed to death in Orange County. Yes, her name was Fern Feather. And many events since then have been sort of dedicated in her honor. People have been building memorials and just trying to remember her positivity and caring nature. And it's just heartbreaking. She was 29 years old. So, certainly not. Yes, an adult, but still just so young to die and have that kind of transphobia. It used to be gay bashing in the sense that if you went to a bar and you were a gay man and you tried to meet other gay men, it was very, very difficult because you would have other men beat you up or try to follow you out to the parking lot and harass you. And hit you with bottles. Right, and smash you up and just be terrible to you, right? And that especially happened to transgender people even more to gay and lesbian people. Going back to Stonewall. The Stonewall Uprising. If you can talk about the Stonewall Uprising. Yeah, a little bit. I'm gonna be funny on the dates because I'm pretty sure it's 75, 1975, but it could have been a few years off. But June 25th, 26th in New York City. There was a happy, active dancing crowd of LGBT people and a woman named Stormy Daniels, I believe, identified as a lesbian, also identified as a drag king, which meant that she performed in male attire. But she identified as a woman. She identified as a butch, lesbian woman, and she was a woman of color. Her parents were, one was white and one was black. So she was one of the first people during the Stonewall riots when the police came. They tried to literally physically put her in the police van to take her away and she got back out over and over and over repeatedly, would not get in the van. And the other people standing around who had also been kicked out of the bar, they didn't leave. Every other time the police came and kicked people out of a bar, they ran away because they were scared. But Stormy was showing them that they didn't have to be. And that's what started the Stonewall riots was a black lesbian woman fighting back saying, no, I'm not going to accept this treatment. And the rest of the crowd stood there and said, we don't have to accept this treatment either. And what they did was chased the police into the bar and locked them in the bar. And this crowd just gathered around the Stonewall bar. I think it was called the Stonewall Inn, but it was a bar that people frequented and people, for days, they kept returning night after night and the crowd kept getting larger and larger. And that showed the gay community that they weren't alone, that there was a broader support of people that were coming out night after night to say, you shouldn't be treated this way. You should be allowed to be who you are. So that was just a real turning point in U.S. history where people started to say, I should be able to be who I am in public. Talking about violence around LBGT recently. In fact, I saw a little bit of a small piece of video, but I really couldn't make it out. The Pride Center in Vermont was... Vandalized. Vandalized and somebody was throwing a brick through the window. Somebody threw a rock through the front door. It was a rock and a brick or just a rock? This most recent time it was a rock. I know this because a few weeks later, the Pride Center was having a big fundraiser and silent auction online, and they auctioned off the actual rock that got thrown into their building as a way to raise money and awareness of... Why does this happen? People don't want... They have this horrible thing called NIMBY. Not in my backyard. Why does this happen to the community? You know, I think it's a matter of fear and derision and bullying and... Derision. People deriding other people, people not being accepting of people who seem different than them and therefore bullying them, trying to make them feel afraid. That's actually a definition of terrorism. And it has been terrorizing our community to feel that if we go out as a visibly queer person, if I go out with this rainbow flag draped over my shoulders, I could get attacked. I could actually get physically harmed. That is terrifying. That is terrorism toward our community. And it still happens. So I actually wrote down a statistic here from within the last couple of years that 85% of LGBTQ youth who are detained, detained by police, locked up, incarcerated, 85% of LGBTQ youth are youth of color. So a vast proportion of BIPOC youth who are detained. So what that shows us is that this is an intersectional issue of homophobia, transphobia, racism. They're all connected. People see difference and they attack. And I think that's heartbreaking. And I think that's why Pride festivals and Pride parades and LGBT people coming together to show their joy, to celebrate who they are, I think that's why it's so important to be visibly out. Harvey Milk in California. Yeah, let's talk about him. I'm sorry I was going to get to that. Let me explain. We did a retrospective on his life. Explain about his activism and, you know, because he got killed. Yes. But explain about his activism and what he did. Yeah, so there's a wonderful movie you can watch that is called Milk. Called Milk, yes. And there are other documentaries about his life. He, I believe, was living on the East Coast, New York maybe, working just like a nine to five business job. No, he was working on the East Coast before he went to California. Okay, I'm sorry. And he was passing. He was not out as gay. And he finally said, I'm not going to do this anymore. I don't want to live this way, not being myself. So he moved to California. He felt it was a safer, more accepting place. And he ran for something like the city council in Vermont, but they call it something different. He ran to be one of the local representatives of his neighborhood. And he won the seat. And he started working with the rest of the counselors in that area of San Francisco, representing all those other neighborhoods. And there was one commissioner in general who was just fiercely homophobic, who just really gave him, gave Harvey Milk a hard, hard time. And that man ended up being the one who killed the mayor and Harvey Milk one day. He came to work one day with a gun and he shot the mayor and he shot Harvey Milk. And just very shortly before that happened, Harvey Milk could sense that it was going to happen. And he recorded, we have a voice recording of him saying, if I am ever killed, let that shot, let that bullet be the shot heard around the world that says everybody come out of the closet. We need to come out to the closet. We need to come out to our families, to our communities, to tell people that someone they love personally identifies this way. And that's how we change the world is by individual personal relationships. So talking about relationships and advocacy, let's go to the Pride Center and your work with that. Go ahead. Great. So in terms of Montpelier Pride's very first Pride Festival, I had the idea just a year ago to start organizing it. And all I did was start sending out emails to every personal friend, every nonprofit organization, every advocacy group in Vermont that I could think of and just asking, hey, what do you think about organizing a Pride Festival from Montpelier? So Montpelier's never had a Pride Festival? This is the first one that we know of. I will defer to our LGBT elders in the community to tell us what was happening in Montpelier earlier in the 70s and 80s because clearly Vermont has been very progressive on LGBT issues compared to the rest of the country, passed a civil unions bill in the 90s and in 2000 passed legislatively the first state in the country to legislatively pass full equal marriage rights for LGBT people. So as a state, as a legislature, as a governing body, Vermont has been very progressive, but there's always been this very intense pushback of homophobia and transphobia within the rural communities of Vermont. And the activists who were originally organizing around the Capitol in Montpelier transitioned to organizing in Burlington. And Burlington is where the Pride Center of Vermont is located. So there's no Pride Center in Montpelier? There's not a dedicated smaller Pride Center anywhere else in the state that I know of. But the Pride Center in Burlington has a large Pride Festival in September. And from what I understand they have chosen to do that later in the fall because of weather constraints, June is pretty unpredictable as far as weather goes. In the month of June. Also because Burlington is the largest population of the state, even though Montpelier is the capital, there's more people in Burlington. So they felt that would be the more sensible place to have a parade and a festival. I thought, this is the state capital. People will travel to the state capital from New Hampshire and Maine and all the surrounding places. They'll travel from the other towns and cities in Vermont just to see the golden dome flying a pride flag in front of it. Just to feel that sense of acceptance in the capital, even though the capital is fairly small in population. So everyone I reached out to was so excited about it. And I just have to say it could never have happened without the Pride Center. I'm just myself. I'm not working for any organization. I'm not working for the Pride Center. I'm not working for anyone. I am just, I consider myself a grassroots community organizer. And within those conversations that I had and those connections I made, the Pride Center of Vermont really stepped up and said, we have been wanting to do this for so long, but we haven't had an on the ground person who lives in Montpelier who can help with the organizing. And because they're all located about an hour away in Burlington, it's really hard to organize from an hour away. So, but the Pride Center does have other employees who live in Montpelier as well who were able to help with this event, especially Kel Arbor, was just absolutely instrumental. As a matter of fact, before the program ends, we're going to show some of his footage from Saturday. Their footage, by the way. Their footage, their footage, yeah. What, so what are some of the misconceptions around LBGT community and people with special needs when people first meet them? You know, I think some of the common misconceptions, one thing that comes to mind is Hannah Gadsby. She's a comedian who has a special on Netflix and she talks about knowing that she was different at such a young age and living in a very, very rural community, I think in Australia, maybe New Zealand. But she talks about what it felt like to live in a community where she constantly heard religious messages of people like this are doomed to hell, in eternity, doomed to burn in fire, right? Just very, very negative messages in her community about gay and lesbian people. Didn't even know transgender people existed, just such a rural space as she was growing up and she said the first time she ever saw any LGBT people was on the television when they were broadcasting pieces of a pride parade happening in Melbourne, maybe. And she was very young. She was not even a teenager yet, but she remembers seeing this pride parade happening and thinking those are my people. Those are actually, that's how I could grow up and be, right? But she also didn't really feel like she fit in with that big loud energy. She's kind of a quieter person, she's autistic. So again, that crossover with disability and queerness is very, very common. And as an autistic person, she really felt like where are the quiet gays is one thing that she said in her special. And I thought when I heard that, they're in Vermont. Because there's just, I think the statistics are something like 25% of the state population identifies as LGBT in Vermont. Way more than other places in the U.S. And so we're here, we're visible in our communities, people know we're here. So let's talk about, and it took a while to happen, gay marriage. If you want to talk about that. Why were they afraid to pass the original law? And there's still some backlash with that. As a matter of fact, Israel doesn't recognize gay marriage under the Torah, under the, you know, religious, right? So explain about that and how countries view it. Yeah, there are many countries around the world that are not safe for gay people to travel to. There are also many places that are much more welcoming of, say, transgender and two-spirited identified people. Indigenous cultures overall are much more accepting of LGBT people. It really depends on where in the world you are. But I think there's really, again, an intersectional issue of race and queerness. For example, there used to be something called the Green Book where black people in America would pass around this pamphlet to each other, letting people know where is it safe to be black, where is it safe to be, to go travel, to stay in a hotel, to go to a gas station, to just travel through that city. And we've done that, too, in the LGBT community. There's not, to my knowledge, there's not a name for a book that's been passed around. But certainly word of mouth happens where we tell our friends, ooh, we had a really bad experience in that town, don't go there. Or we really felt like people were looking at us and glaring at us and wanting to attack us. For example, there are some places that people with special needs are scared to go to because of that very same thing. There may not be accessibility or they may not even be able to get there or let alone be treated as just a human being once they're there. So, yeah, I think there's a lot of cross-sectionality, too, within people just feeling like, this is a community that has made a thoughtful effort to include me, right? And this is one of the things I'm the most excited about and grateful to the Pride Center for helping make happen and the City of Montpelier for helping make happen and the Pride flags currently flying along State Street and Main Street downtown in Montpelier. That is such a visible, colorful, bright statement, public statement, not just to LGBT people but to the entire community that anybody who drives by sees, hey, this is a place that welcomes diversity, that welcomes people who are different, that welcomes people who express themselves differently, who identify differently. It's okay to be here, right? It's a very visible statement. So, in terms of going back to the words, L-V-T-I-A or A-I-I, can you kind of bring that to light? Sure. Historically, I believe the acronym began as GLB and switched maybe around the 50s or 60s. I don't know exactly when it changed but the L came first because gay men, for a good period of time, were considered the most acceptable in the community. They considered the most visible, especially white gay men, sort of represented the entire community of queer people and lesbians came forward and said, that's not okay. That's, you know, we exist too. And the L began being more acceptable to put before the G, L standing for lesbian. And bisexual was added because bisexuality was sometimes so invisible in our community. People can be in a straight passing relationship. They call it, and someone will never know that you're queer. Someone will never know that you're actually bisexual because you married someone that from the outside it appears that you're in a heterosexual relationship. So lesbian, gay, bisexual, the T was added transgender is what that stands for. Some transgender people, especially at the time of Stonewall, Marsha P. Johnson, identified as transsexual. That was a word that was used more commonly before now. Transsexual, now transgender. And these were people like drag kings and drag queens who they may still identify as a man or a woman but they love to cross dress or they love to perform in the attire of someone of the opposite sex. And the binariness of gender, male and female being the only two options of how to be, that has been changing especially with the youth. That has been changing so much over the recent decades. And that is why the QIA has been added actually because queer questioning, the Q can stand for queer or questioning people who are just trying to figure themselves out. Queer is a really difficult word for a lot of people in our community. It has been used as a slur, as a form of harassment, as just a really nasty thing to say to people and it's been reclaimed by many people in the LGBT community just like the word gay used to mean something else. It was reclaimed. Gay means happy. Gay used to mean. Like the Flintstones, have a gay old time. Have a gay old time and some of our Christmas carols say, you know, deck the halls with, make the yuletide gay. Gertrude Stein was the lesbian woman in the 1930s who sort of claimed that word for the queer community and made it mean something that gay people could identify with in a positive way because it did mean something positive. Queer is really different because it used to mean something really negative and we have reclaimed it and said, no, we want to be queer. We're proud that we're queer. We're proud that we're different or odd is another meaning of that word. And then the I and the A. Intersex would probably most commonly in the medical terms be called hermaphrodite, people who have been born with some... A lot of Greek culture like this. Like gods and goddesses, right? Or Clash of the Titans. You know, there's a movie Clash of the Titans, hermaphrodite. Or, you know, hermaphrodite was a Greek goddess. Certainly, back all through time we can find examples of people who were what we would call today transgender or people who were what we would call today intersex. People who they weren't, when they were born they weren't a man or a woman. They're a baby. They were a boy or a girl. They were both, you know. And so who are they in our society? Sometimes they grow up to be athletes and they look like a woman but they have a lot of testosterone in their body. So this is a big issue in sports. This is a big issue in all sorts of areas of our community, of our whole world where people are like, what does it mean to be a man or a woman? And so many people in the queer community are saying it shouldn't matter. We are all people. It shouldn't matter that we're one or the other. No, the last, well, it's not the last question, but how has the media... perceived the LBGG community and also disabled community within that? You know, there's been TV shows depicting gay pride. Right, Will and Grace was one that was just so novel and unheard of in its time, in the time that it began to be a series. People had never seen gay people on screen before or very rarely, unless you went to very special underground places. But Will and Grace was one of the first series that really depicted a gay character in a positive light as a good person. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy? Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, yes. And today I think there's a new one that's been redone just called Queer Eye. Yeah, there are definitely a few. And I just wanted to mention that the depictions of LGBT people have changed and transitioned so much over the years. Broke Back Mountain was such a powerful movie for some. But a lot of what we feel within the LGBT community is it is incredibly difficult to find a movie with queer characters that ends well. Like with a happy ending, like a rom-com. Speaking of that, now this is going back 80s, 90s. Rent, the Broadway play. And eventually a movie. Rent is so beautiful. One of the people I think passed away who created that. For those that are explaining the backstory of that and how that kind of brought some of the history of LGBT. Yeah, you know, I wouldn't be the expert by any means to talk about rent other than I love the movie so much. And it was just instrumental for me in my 20s to be able to watch a movie with so much dancing and laughing and loving and caring among a queer group of friends. And each of those individuals were very different from each other and very unique in their own identities. But they came together as friends and really, really just cared about each other. And that expression of queer joy I think is just what we're craving more of. That was really wonderful to see. But again, rent is also a very, very heartbreaking, devastating story about the AIDS epidemic. Yeah, we have a couple minutes in terms of that. People say AIDS came from somewhere else. People say that AIDS and HIV came as a gay disease and they say horrible things about it. Yeah, some of the very, very instrumental activists who were able to bring attention to the AIDS epidemic in a way that politicians and doctors started even paying attention to the vast number of people who were dying were people who contracted HIV who were not queer. Because finally people could see that this is not just a gay disease, that this can affect everyone and anyone. And it was just such a problem the thousands and thousands of people who were dying just because it wasn't being paid attention to, just because it had that stereotype attached to it. It was a really devastating time and people lost a lot of loved ones. And also there was a movie, Philadelphia. Oh, incredible movie. Incredible movie. Yeah. And a couple of depictions of how the media perceives LPGT. Yeah, and how heterosexual people, when they meet someone who's queer, change their minds about their humanity. Yeah. Well, really quick, what are your future goals of your activism and how do you see that going in the future? That's a great question. Because like I said my diagnoses of bipolar and other illnesses are fairly recent, I'm still in an ongoing process of healing and transition myself to find a way to live with these disorders in a healthy way. And so there have been times throughout this past year that I've had to take a lot of time off in organizing or that I've had to delegate and ask other people to do a lot of things that I haven't been able to do. And so really my goals and my vision going forward is first of all that Montpelier will have a Pride Festival every year. And also that I'll have help, you know, that people will step up. And there's nothing wrong with asking for help. Exactly, exactly. That there's always people who want to help if we ask. Well, I would like to thank you for coming on this edition of Abled in Our Nair. For more information on the Pride Center and its work in Vermont and beyond, you can go to www.PrideCenterVT.org. That is P-R-I-D-E-C-E-N-T-E-R.org. I'd like to thank you again for joining us on this edition of Abled in Our Nair. Thank you. For more information on Abled in Our Nair, you can go to www.OrcaMedia.net. We'd like to thank our sponsors, Washington County Mental Health, Green Mountain Support Services, and many others, including the Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired, the Division for the Blind and Visually Impaired, and also the partnership with the Pride Center as well as our guest Elaine Ball from Montpelier. Thank you again for joining us on this edition of Abled in Our Nair. I'm Aaron Seiler. See you next time. Major sponsors for Abled in Our Nair include Green Mountain Support Services, empowering people with disabilities to live home in the community. Washington County Mental Health, where hope and support come together. Media sponsors for Abled in Our Nair include Park Chester Times, Muslim Community Report, WWW, this is the Bronx.info, Associated Press Media Editors, New York Powered Online Newspaper, U.S. Press Corps Domestic and International, Anchor FM, and Spotify. Partners for Abled in Our Nair include Yechad of New York and New England, where everyone belongs, the Orthodox Union, the Division for the Blind and Visually Impaired of Vermont, the Vermont Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired, Center Vermont Habitat for Humanity, and Montpelier Sustainable Coalition, Montefiore Medical Center of the Bronx, Rose of Kennedy Center of Bronx, New York, Albert Einstein College of Medicine of the Bronx, Abled in Our Nair has been seen in the following publications. Park Chester Times, WWW, this is the Bronx.com, New York Powered Online Newspaper, Muslim Community Report, WWW.H.com, and the Montpelier Bridge. Abled in Our Nair is part of the following organizations. The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, Boston, New England Chapter, and the Society of Professional Journalists.