Contest

We are excited to announce the winner of the Mobile Beacon Moments Storytelling Contest.

Congrats to our #MBMoments winner, Dynamic Community Solutions! Thanks to everyone who shared, voted, and learned about the organizations we serve!


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Title: Strategy for Access Foundation NFP
Author: mb_moments_admin
Votes: ?

Category: MB Moments Top 10
Views: ?
Description:

Strategy For Access's Mobile Beacon Moment

If awarded with a Mobile Beacon Community Grant, how will your organization use the monetary donation?

A donation from Mobile Beacon would be put toward maintaining and developing our website (fun4thedisabled.com) and periodic newsletter and would fuel work on upcoming video projects, as Strategy for Access NFP (StrAF) expands our coverage of disability rights issues and policy.

StrAF produces short videos and documentaries for and about the disabled community. Our videos allow the disabled to become aware that they are an integral part of a much larger global society and have much to share, not despite their disability but because of who they are.

While most of our team members are interns or volunteers, StrAF incurs production costs, such as paying an ASL interpreter and a captioning agency to make our videos accessible. We also paid a puppet master to introduce some more fun videos. From time to time, we incur fees for legal services in connection with confirming necessary copyright and publication permissions.

Future projects that would benefit from the support of an award include the planned production of a video interview of Judith Heumann, a landmark activist, and leader in the disability community. We also plan a series of subsequent projects on policy changes to benefit people with disabilities in the fields of healthcare, mental health, employment, education, and transportation. The City of Chicago's five-year community health improvement plan barely addresses people with disabilities. We aim to organize a coalition of organizations and community leaders to supplement the current program so the voices and needs of people with disabilities can be heard. Funds from the Grant would help us publicize this goal, garner interest, and publicize the results as we make progress.

How will your organization use the 10 mobile hotspots with free internet service?

Our team is growing quickly, and with ten mobile hotspots, we would significantly enhance team members' productivity. Unreliable internet connection has been a real problem for us. Both virtual communication during team meetings, and work on video projects, such as uploading and downloading huge files, require a good connection for long periods.

We also aim to address the digital divide in Cook County, Illinois -- where 25% of households lack high-speed internet and 17% of POC families don't have a computer. With the grant, we would face this head-on, bringing new low-income members to the team and getting them the tools to work effectively. Some of the grant money would go to training those new team-members with relevant technology and software.

Share Your Story

At Fun4theDisabled/Strategy for Access, we believe that people with disabilities must be celebrated. We intend to advocate for ourselves and support the disability community by providing connections to available resources. We also discuss relevant issues to foster inclusion and promote disabled voices. In line with this mission, we create and distribute digital media, including videos and newsletters, that can spark meaningful conversation and lead to social change.

Work at Fun4theDisabled has been done virtually since its foundation. We have long depended on a weak internet connection to keep open communication lines between our volunteers from around the country and world.

As the founder of Strategy for Access, which manages fun4thedisabled.com, I have had a Mobile Beacon hotspot since the nonprofit’s start and used it religiously, allowing me to keep working when my office's internet has had problems. At the beginning of the pandemic when everyone started working at home, the neighborhood's broadband service was overloaded, so the cable company had to install a new fiber-optic network, leading to frequent internet outages for about two months. There are still outages to this day, including one last week during our team meeting. If I didn't have a hotspot, I wouldn't have been able to show up to lead the discussion, and my team members wouldn't have even known why.

As I mention in the video, having my Mobile Beacon hotspot proved incredibly useful during Hurricane Dorian, allowing us to send out an emergency newsletter with safety and evacuation information specifically for people with disabilities. I could make corrections to the newsletter and send it out from the road, far from any wifi connection, so that we could send the alert in time and disabled lives could be saved. My hotspot has been invaluable to me already, and if the rest of the team had them too, we would be unstoppable.

 

 

Contest is finished!