The Access Radio Hour blends music by disabled artists and conversations about disability at Emerson. Hosted by Access: Student Disability Union's Vice President for Community, Greyson Acquaviva, this accessible radio show brings disability to WECB every Friday from 2-3pm EST.
The audio of this segment can be found here.
The video of this segment can be found here.
Hey Access Community. It's Harper here, your Access president. We've had a really, really great semester here at Access: Student Disability Union so I wanted to take a few minutes of my time and your time to recap the semester, highlight the great work that our community has done and celebrate another semester in the books for us all.
So let's just get right into it and take a look at every Emersonian favorite thing— numbers.
So we have this email list here at Access that is a really key way that we measure our membership and our reach and at the beginning of the semester we had 20 people on it, which is great and sizable and that was definitely an improvement from where we were in the spring but then this semester, just three and a half months later. Our email list has grown to 44 people which is like double the people and that's just a really amazing feat that I know I'm super proud of I'm always super happy to have so many people involved in Access even if people make meetings just that they're getting the emails, reading what's going on, staying up to date.
And another huge way that people stay up-to-date with Access is of course our social media. That's probably how you're watching this video here. It's mainly on our Instagram. We really try to keep that space active and alive. And we start of the semester with around 200 followers and now we have 328. So, again a huge jump in numbers. And so that's just a huge thank you to everyone who's been following us on social media, engaging with our posts. And a big shout out goes to partner orgs that we have like POWER and ECSU who share our account to their story and we always get a boost and followers when y'all do that. So huge thanks to everyone who's helped us contribute to our growing size.
Now stats out of the way, let's talk about our meetings. So we've met every Friday, 7 p.m. EST, which is 6 p.m. for me down here in Texas. But that was a total of 12 meetings this semester and we had a really, really great time in those meetings. We had that first introductory meeting where we sort of got started talking about the semester. And then our second meeting, we spent some time in breakout groups talking about what it means to be disabled at Emerson, what that experience is like and then our third meeting we talked about some new content opportunities that were arising around that time, which I will get to of course. But then as we entered October, we sort of gotten to this grove of doing these like topic-based meetings where we would have a topic and then discuss it, maybe look at a resource about it and and have a good conversation. So we were able to have some really really great conversations about inspiration porn, the cultural appropriation of disability on Halloween, and media representations of disability. So those are some really great conversations. And when November came around, the presidential election came with it and we set aside some time in a meeting to just have a space for community, commiseration, and conversation. We love alliteration. And then our last formal meeting of the semester, we had our e-board leading a discussion about the state of accessibility and disability advocacy at the college. Just having some more great conversations. We also had some social events this semester. Always moves just to hang out a little less formal. We had movie night and game night, and then a casual hang out to celebrate the end of the semester. So thank you to everyone who came to a meeting the semester, even if it was just one or two. Thank you for being a part of Access, for the insightful conversations, to that dedication to learning and the good times that we all shared together. So a huge thank you.
And of course one of the most exciting things this semester was that content thing I was alluding to earlier. And it honestly just fell into our lap, but in September the radio station here WECB reached out to us and asked “hey, you want a radio show?” And we were like, “Yeah, we want a radio show!” So, you know Access putting out content has sort of always been a dream of Access e-board members past and present. I know Zach Swasta was always like “Access YouTube channel, let's do it.” And I'm so on board, but we're starting with radio. Which is just a really great opportunity to create The Access Radio Hour. So the Access Radio Hour blends music by disabled artists, conversations about disability Emerson and the music that Access community is listening to and loves. It blends all that together into this one really great show that's hosted by our VP for Community Greyson Acquaviva. Bless! And so yeah, it's every Friday 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on WECB. And so we that all semester. Every Friday we had music and an interview by someone in our Access Community. This semesters interviewees included myself, Shruti, Abbie, Alex, Tiana, Dylan, Greyson. Look at all these amazing people. And we also had a friendsgiving episode where we heard from 11 Access members about what they were thankful for this year. All those interview segments are uploaded to our website, which we debuted it this semester as well. And each interview has an accompanying transcript that goes along with the audio because we want everything we do to be accessible. And so we've put a lot of love and labor into those transcripts to make our show accessible. We've put so much love in labor into the show in general. As host, Greyson has put so much amazing work into it, you know, compiling the music, doing all the interviews. And it's, for me, been an honor to serve as the production manager and occasional co-host on the show. So that show is fantastic and been so much fun. And it's actually continuing through winter break. So tune in on Fridays, y'all, you gotta. You got to keep listening, some fun stuff is coming.
So, then of course, we cannot talk about Access’ semester without talking about the huge event that we had. We had an event, y'all! We hosted Imani Barbarin! We had An Evening with Imani Barbarin. All semester we've been working super hard with our amazing co-hosting organizations Flawless Brown, EBONI, and POWER to bring this event about intersectionality, disability, race, justice, advocacy to Emerson. And Imani Barbarin was just like the perfect person to bring in for this event. She's a disability rights activist, inclusion activist, speaker. She's uses her voice and her social media platforms to create really engaging conversations about disability and with the disability community. And so it was just a perfect match to have her here for this event. You know when I say “here” I mean virtually, it was all in Zoom. But we did have the event on Zoom, November 13th. It was a really great success. We had over 40 people in attendance. Imani gave a short keynote address, then our VP for Advocacy Shruti engaged Imani in sort of a guided discussion and then we turn it over to everyone else
for a Q&A and Imani answered about maybe nearly 10 questions from the audience. And it was just such a great time. I know I personally got a lot out of everything Imani had to say and I will not soon forget the wisdom that she imparted upon us all so a huge thank you to everyone who made that event possible. It was definitely a village. So a huge thank you to Imani and her team, to Jason and Jenna from SEAL, to everyone at Flawless, EBONI and POWER, especially Jalyn, Max, Eryn, Naomi, AZ, and Alexandra. Y’all are the best. And of course the biggest hugest shout out to Shruti. Thank you so much, Shruti, for working super hard as the project leader on this all semester. You did an amazing job leading us through the creation and execution of this incredible event. So wonderful work there.
And that's not all Shruti has been up to. Shruti is our VP for Advocacy, like I said, so she's been very hard at work with me, as president, as we've worked on a number of advocacy and accessibility projects this semester. That's of course a huge part of what Access does. So this semester we actually started a very fruitful collaboration with POWER in which we meet monthly with Student Accessibility Services to you know sort of have like a joint intersectional approach to topics of accessibility and disability on campus. So those meetings have often consisted of myself, Shruti and Dylan from Access. We've also had Max and Eryn from POWER. And of course Matt, Di-erin and — oh my god, Di-erin. I'm talking too fast. Matt. Diane. Erin. So many people. But that's the great thing. It's like we have so many people coming together to work on all these amazing projects and these meetings. So yeah, we met four times this semester we discussed so much, everything from SAS’s social media use, which if you're not following SAS, what are you doing? Go follow them. We've talked about SAS awareness in the college community, medical racism and the way that affects, you know accommodations and all that kind of stuff. We talked about, you know, the, the pandemic! Like dealing with you know, accommodations and accessibility in this new weird pandemic time. We've talked about how to work together to include disability in educational programs like diversityEDU that POWER is currently working on. And then of course the most tangible thing that's come from this collaboration and these meetings has been this accommodations list as we've dubbed— it’s the accommodations list. And so this is basically a list of like the most common accommodations that we actually compiled together at one of those first Access meetings, but now there's this list that SAS has made into a cute little PDF and it has all the common accommodations. And so it's— the idea is that you know, by having this list that students can look at as they're going through that, you know, interactive, individualized, collaborative SAS process students will have a better idea of what's possible and therefore more access to those accommodations and they'll be able to get those accommodations quicker and smoother and you know sort of be able to solve problems before they start, which is a huge guiding principle in all the disability advocacy work here at Access.
And sort of jumping off of that one of those ways that we're trying to sort of solve problems before they start is by making the physical spaces at Emerson as accessible as possible, like, that's of course a huge thing. So our elevator cues initiative is a great example of this. Currently on our campus, there's not consistency in the elevator audios. Some elevators have really great audios where they beat at every floor and do everything that someone who would rely on audio cues for accessibility would need. Other elevators, you know, fail to make floor announcements and other accessibility cues. And this has been an issue that we've been working on for a while, bringing it up to facilities talking about it at Accessibility Advisory Board meetings with you know, big administers at the college. It’s been on our list for a while. And you know, this is an issue for a lot of people but it's also going to be an issue in the future. And so the hope is that by solving this problem, we cannot only change the narrative for people who have already been facing this issue, that have already been having, you know, this contribute to a negative experience of being disabled at Emerson, but we can also rewrite the narrative for people that you know are coming after us and so that people in the future will have a better experience than we did and the people before us. So we've actually been able to make some progress on this. Of course, we're still waiting for that like full fruition. We're not quite a push-button level yet, but we're getting there. We've been told by facilities at the funding for this project has actually been secured and that there are now waiting for the schedule from the elevator vendor and that this project should see some really good progress by mid-January. So we will of course continue to push for transparency on this project and report back to you guys in the community about how this is going. Hopefully, it will really get there soon and we'll be one step closer to that more accessible Emerson that I know I dream of. I hope everyone's dreaming of that. Everyone should be.
I keep doing this. Whatever, haha.
So lastly but not least, one of the big things that happened this semester was that Access got affiliated! After a year— a little over a year actually, of, you know, building this org from the ground up when working really hard not just to cast a vision but to live into that vision, Access received affiliation from the college, which is such an honor and a wonderful wonderful thing. So that means a lot of different things to be affiliated. It but one of the biggest is that we’ll have access to funding. So next semester will will get down into it and start working on a budget. And it'll be really really helpful to have some some funding, you know, so that we can, you know, improve the ease of our day-to-day functioning and you know do even more for the disability community here at Emerson. But the affiliation is also kind of symbolic in a way, you know, it's a recognition from the college that what we're doing is something that's good and worthwhile, something the college values and wants to support now and in the future. It's not a guarantee or anything that Access will be around, like forever-forever. But it roots us deeper into the ground and sets us up for a better more sustainable future, which is what we want. You know from our founding, we've always dreamed of a day when Access was, like, an integral part of the DNA of intercultural orgs and advocacy orgs at Emerson. You know, it's a day when disabled students know where to go for community and support and collaboration and feel safe enough and empowered enough to actually go there. And thrive there on top of that. And so we're always striving towards that day. And I really do believe that we're well on our way, that we're doing a lot of really great work, you know building the org but also like having people in the org now and you know functioning for today and tomorrow. And affiliation is just another, you know, strengthening to that mission.
So that's been the semester at Access. We've been very busy and you know, I'm excited to see where the future takes us. I'm excited for next semester and also to see our community, you know, flourish far beyond that. So thank you to all of you for being a part of Access’ wonderful fall 2020 semester, for all the support and for watching this little video. Here's to more community, advocacy, and action and, of course, disability justice in the spring. I hope you all have a safe and happy and restful— take some time for your rest. But have a good holiday season, you guys, and I'm wishing you all all the best in the year ahead. Thanks.