This has been an eventful three weeks thanks to work trips, work crisis,
and family vacation (peppered with an annoying internet issue) and slowly
getting caught up. I finally heard from someone at the Oberkotter Foundation to
find out if it was possible to get the grant application “off line” – in other
words, get what is needed without registering/applying. The outcome was not
what I wanted…they tried and could not get this for me and told me at this time, will
not be able to consider organizational requests (only program requests –
usually educational programs) so time was not on my side…they just recently
stopped accepting organizational grant requests so I have to shift to some other sources.
Because of this, I’m going to change my scope for the
smaller grant and focus on a one-day workshop in conjunction with a state
conference that is hopefully going to take place next year. In other words the
attendees of the conference will be able to attend this “pre-conference”
workshop. For the bigger grant, that would be workshops at various education
centers around the state to reach a much larger audience. Doing the smaller one
will in effect test the effectiveness of such a workshop. I feel that based on
my experience, it would be effective, but in doing this, it would further
support the larger project grant fund request, especially on behalf a small organization such as the Texas Chapter of AGBell. Such support will include evaluations from attendees, letters of support from those attendees.
Tentatively, this is the plan:
** One day workshop to take place the day before a
1 ½ day statewide conference for the deaf
**
Workshop will see grant assistance with
accessibility and speakers, in-kind support from the Texas Chapter of AG Bell
Association for the Deaf.
**
Two speakers: one from a state agency that
informs attendees of state services available to students with various
disabilities, not just deafness and the second speaker, a deaf educator who
goes over classroom techniques. Looking into getting a legal expert to talk on education, legal responsibilities of educators (this one may be at a significant cost). A panel
of students will likely be presented during the conference itself (still in the
works).
·
Budget will be fairly small for the conference workshop because the Texas
Chapter of AGBell is going to support by providing the location, advertising,
and a small monetary “in-kind” contribution toward speaker travel. The state
speaker’s time is professional time, will be local, and no honorarium is
expected due to the fact they are representing the state. The educator will be
reimbursed for travel (mileage+hotel+meals) and will receive a small honorarium.
Interestingly, I showed my gantt charts to a couple people
who have provided funding to the conferences in the past. They said they were
very good; however, for one group, they prefer simple schedules (tables with
timeframes) given their reviewers are community members with varying
backgrounds, but I cannot go wrong providing both the gantt chart and the
schedule table. In reference to the gantt chart I provided not having labels on the bars – it was a quirk of
the MS Project program I used that didn’t label the bars. I have a request to
MS to see what can be done about that. Am sure there is a way and would like to see this happen.
Will post more today and tomorrow of some other aspects of
my proposal that I’m working on. Please do provide some insights on what I've suggested here in terms of my scope. The workshop itself, while focused on deafness, will include information from the legal expert about other disabilities because there are students who have multiple disabilities in addition to deafness so the focus will not be too much on just deafness for this workshop. The larger scale workshop (all around the state) will encompass various disabilities and reach a broader audience to include regular and special ed educators.
