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If you don't work at an organization that doesn't specifically work with people with disabilities, you don't have to worry about making your fundraising events accessible, right? Wrong. So wrong. As our guest Christy Herzing from Paraquad says, "Making your event accessible speaks to a level of inclusion that can increase your donor base." That's something we all want, right? Christy was joined by her colleague Sandy Jones also from Paraquad to talk to Marjorie about what basic accessibility accomodations you should look for in planning events to save yourself time and trouble in the long run and how to think outside of the box to make sure that all of your guests feel comfortable and welcome. Connect with Christy at cherzing@paraquad.org, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, or by calling her at 314-289-4264. Connect with Sandy at sjones@paraquad.org, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, or by calling her at 314-289-4274. Connect with Us! Natalie on LinkedIn- https://www.linkedin.com/in/nataliejablonski Marjorie on LinkedIn- http://www.linkedin.com/in/marjorie-moore 501Crossroads on Facebook- http://www.facebook.com/501crossroads 501Crossroads on Twitter- http://www.twitter.com/501crossroads 501Crossroads on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC06RxW8CDSTZF05S9bK9UoA Listen to this episode on... Apple Podcasts Stitcher Overcast TuneIn YouTube Transcript: Marjorie: 00:02 Welcome to 501Crossroads, your show all about nonprofits and the people that make the mission happen. I'm Marjorie Moore, President & CEO of MindsEye and my personal mission is to make nonprofit stronger by identifying and fixing the rubs that so often come up between people and the mission. Natalie is at the dojo again today. Marjorie: 00:15 She's taken a lot of days off here for training, but I am excited because today we have two guests in the studio with us. We have Sandy Jones who is the community relations and events coordinator for Parquad here in St. Louis and Christy Herzing, the community access coordinator, also at Paraquad. Sandy, Christy welcome. Sandy: 00:38 Thank you for having us. Marjorie: 00:39 So Sandy tell us a little bit about you and what you do at Paraquad maybe introduce Paraquad a little bit because I'm going to guess most of our listeners are not in St. Louis and have never heard of it. Sandy: 00:49 So Parquad is St. Louis a center for independent living. We work with people with disabilities to empower them to live their lives as independently as they choose. I have the privilege of planning events for Paraquad. So I work, ah, we have several different events throughout the year every year though you're pretty much guaranteed to have our Shine the Light Gala and our Ramp Up for Accessibility Day which actually just happened yesterday. Marjorie: 01:13 Awesome. And Christy, what about you what do you do there at Parquad. Christy: 01:16 So I am the community access coordinator and I manage our Accessible STL program. And so through our Accessible STL program we're working with businesses and organizations to provide a site survey so we're looking at their facilities and determining if they are accessible based upon the Americans With Disabilities Act standards and then we also provide training and education on being more inclusive for people with disabilities as well as. A whole lot of other services just for businesses that want to be more inclusive, consulting, you name, it we kind of do it on the business end of things and we also have what Sandy's talking about with the events. We also have a training on how to make meetings and events more accessible. Marjorie: 02:07 It's awesome well that is why we are here today. One of the things that I hear probably way too often when about community talking to other exec directors or event planners who aren't in an organization that is specifically serving people with disabilities. They'll say well, "there's no blind people coming to my event or there's nobody that's going to be in a wheelchair or all of my guests can hear perfectly fine, like why do I need to do this" So why is it important for events especially fundraising events to be accessible in the first place? Christy: 02:40 So it's important for them to be accessible in the first place because you don't know who's coming in the door, so you don't particularly fundraising events. You don't know who that next donor is going to be or who that donor's family member is going to be. Christy: 02:58 So to be accessible and to think about that from the beginning because if you don't think about accessibility from the very beginning then if you wait for someone to ask for an accommodation then you could find yourself in a spot where someone asks for "I need this accommodation because I use a wheelchair," and oops we have picked an event location that doesn't have an entrance with a ramp that is accessible and then all of a sudden we're trying to figure out what we need to do. So thinking about accessibility from the beginning is very important but also making your event accessible is it speaks to a level of inclusion that then can help increase that donor base because donor bases are aging as well. And so that's very important to keep in mind as well. Marjorie: 03:49 I guess the other thing is that I guess we have we have this picture in our mind, I think sometimes of a younger person that has a disability. But I think the one thing that we all know since we all work in that field is a lot of times it's our friends and our donors who have been with us for years maybe that donor giving you $25 for 50 years, well look, they're 70 now and maybe there's a mobility disability and maybe hearing's not so good anymore. Sandy: 04:17 Kind of aging into that disability and what does that mean moving forward. And how to make something inclusive for them as well. Marjorie: 04:24 So let's talk about some horror stories or some not to do is what have you guys seen out there it. And we've all been there. I'm going I'm going to it right from the beginning. I've screwed this up. And like I mentioned you know we work with people who are visually impaired at MindsEye. But you know we we screwed it up a couple of years ago we had a table full of people the varying levels of vision and they were supposed to be served first at our gala. And for some reason the people set out the buffet food and then the rest of our guests just decided to get up and get all their food before all the things. And so our guests had no idea that there was food there. The other problem that we had actually that year too was or for some reason our wait staff didn't think to specifically ask our guests with disabilities if they wanted the food that was just being passed around on trays. So we've since trained them. So what if you guys heard or seen? Sandy: 05:27 So I'm going to give a couple of examples from my own personal experience. They've both been events with Paraquad. So I mentioned earlier our Shine the Light event. It is a large formal gala this past year took place at the Ritz-Carlton. And we do everything we can to ensure that all accommodations are met. We are very open in the beginning, "Hey if you need the accommodation just email Sandy she'll take care of it." And we do that and we account for absolutely everything and then we add in some cushion and know that there may be people who didn't tell me or things that I already know because we have a good relationship with them all that kind of stuff. So we had a guest who was deaf and needed sign language interpreters we always have sign language interpreter at our events. Sandy: 06:17 That's no big deal. We have one on stage to interpret everything that's happening on stage. And then we also have one at the table for table conversations during the event. We had set up the camera and everything to have a picture and picture show so that when the let's say the screen is got like a video on it showing the person who's on stage there is a smaller picture on the bottom that has the interpreter visible. So it's two different cameras. Both of them are on the same screen. So we get the first of the evening started and our interpreter is in the dark. They're up there. They're interpreting. There's a camera on them but the camera is not completely focused on them and the interpreter is in the dark. So our guest who is deaf could not see the picture on picture screen of the interpreter interpreting. So I had to kind of run around get our production crew which was fantastic and they got on it right away. They started playing with the camera as they started playing with the lighting they started playing with the the mark where the interpreter was supposed to be standing. All of that was going on. I had to go over to the table where our deaf guest was sitting and say hey let me have this interpreter interpret for you...Can you see the interpreter because the lights are low because the screens are on. Can't see the interpreter at the table so I have to turn the lights up so that that person can see the interpreter sitting at their table. All of this sounds really long and probably for less than five to ten minutes, by that time everything was fixed. But at the time it definitely felt like oh my gosh how do we make this happen? You know we had everything set up right. It was going to you know it should have worked out great. But there are just like minor cues so now we we work to get our interpreters there a little bit earlier so that we can make sure the camera is focusing properly on them and make sure that everything will be good event. Sandy: 08:13 Because a lot of times interpreters will switch out onstage because they get fatigued so kind of make sure that our camera is set up for both of the interpreters who will be switching out all night and make sure that everything is taken care of in that way. Sandy: 08:25 So that's that's one of one of the ones that we've had recently and another one was we had a foreign film. We had some guests from out of the country. They brought some films with them and they had subtitles on them. So we're like OK great there sound there are subtitles. Everything's great. We've taken care of everyone's needs. The sound was in a foreign language so our guests who were blind or low vision were not able to hear what was being said. Sandy: 08:53 So we were able to get a couple of our staff to go and sit next to people and kind of read the subtitles to them as well. But that was another one of those like, oh my gosh how do we fix this? I can't believe this just happened right now. And those are definitely both learning moments to make sure that we're addressing those kinds of issues too. Marjorie: 09:11 So for all of us out there feel feel OK the pros get it wrong too. So what I do after that is is learning and trying and making sure that like you putting forth the effort and you're trying to think about in advance and when you get it right, it's so much better. Christy, what have you seen? Christy: 09:27 So as someone who has a visual impairment the things that Sandy was just talking about the last description that she was talking about, I go to a lot of conferences and things like that. And a lot of times they will play videos up on the screen and there will be words that are put out there and they'll have closed captioning for people who are deaf or hard of hearing but a lot of times are messages that are on the screen that are put into words and they're not spoken. And so when we can't see that, we don't get nearly the same message that everyone else gets. A,, couple of other things that I've seen. I've been to many different national conferences and tends to be that disability is forgotten about. And I went to one where the venue was more the issue than anything else there was it was a conference for a program that mostly people with disabilities were running and they had two small elevators that got you up and down to anywhere in the hotel. And so for people who were using wheelchairs it was never ending, all day process to get up and down the elevators. So things like that, you know ,that really everything has to be taken into consideration and everybody gets it wrong, occasionally and it's OK to get it wrong as long as you learn from it in the process. Christy: 10:55 But it definitely that was like one of my first conferences I ever went to, and I mean I only knew so much about accessibility at that point, and I went, "Wait, what? How did this happen?" It was it was definitely a moment where there were a lot of people saying. "How... what are we supposed to do now." I think one time the elevators got used so much that the elevators actually stopped. Christy: 11:23 It was just that bad. Marjorie: 11:34 No that is not good.So let's talk a little bit about what are some some best practices you know from from right from the beginning to let people with disabilities know without being like Hey!!! That you're accessible so that if somebody is coming maybe with their spouse that's having some hearing difficulties that they know that, oh OK, it's going to be alright or if they know they're going to have a walker. They know that they're going to be able to get out. What are some best practices to let people know so that maybe they don't have to like shout and say hey I need help. Sandy: 12:04 So now it's a little unique for Paraquad because we are disability services organizations so inherently we do everything we possibly can to accommodate for many different types of disabilities. But we found the thing that helps the most is to just let people know that it's OK to ask for those accommodations so on every invitation that we create for any of our events we always say something like, please ask for an accommodation or to ask for an accommodation contact this person or you know anything like that. So it's already right there like if you're willing to be asked for an accommodation, your event is probably already on its way to being accessible and inclusive for people with disabilities. So that's probably the best thing that we do. Again like I said, we're all different because that's what our focus is. But if I see something that says, for an accommodation please contact them, I'm like OK, it doesn't matter that I need this accommodation. This person's going to welcome me and make sure that I'm included and involved in the event Marjorie: 13:03 And that actually may even help people who have had transplants or things like that or people that have different food needs even now. It's not necessarily disability, but definitely somebody that might need a little bit of a little bit of different help. So it's always good. And you know the more people that you can bring in the better right? Marjorie: 13:22 So let's talk about specific things to accommodate maybe some different disability. So what would you recommend if you knew that you were going to have somebody who was low vision or blind at your event. Christy: 13:37 So the first thing I would recommend is and we say this all the time, and you'll hear this recommendation come from us all the time is when a person calls you and tells you they need an accommodation because of a specific disability. The first thing you want to do is make sure you ask that person what they need, because certainly for someone who is blind or low vision, you want to make sure you have alternative formats such as large print and braille or being able to offer those fo…
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