ADI team remain busy while working remotely

As you read ADI’s Newsletter, we hope you and your family are safe and well. The national effort to control the spread of Covid-19 has resulted in a huge upheaval for the entire Irish population. Like many, the ADI team are adjusting to working remotely and have remained busy. Consequently, there is a lot to update you on.

Since the 13 March the ADI office has been closed and generally our hours remain 9.30am-5.30pm. The easiest way to get in touch still remains email. Here is a link to the staff contact details on ADI’s website. We can either respond to your email by return or arrange a telephone or video call back. All post is being redirected and will be passed on to the relevant team member.

The Arts and Disability Connect selection panel was scheduled to meet on Tuesday 24 March in the Sean O’Casey Centre. We are delighted to say that we were able to reschedule this for the same date as a Zoom video conference. The panel was chaired by an Arts Council council member, with 4 panellists, a representative from Arts Participation at Arts Council, as well as two representatives from ADI. €39,350 was distributed and 14 artists have already received their initial payments. Full details of the successful awardees follow in this Newsletter.

ADI want to congratulate playwright, disability activist and broadcaster Steve Daunt who received a Gold award for Innovation at the New York Festivals Radio Awards for his programme Between the Lines: In Our Words, Living with a Disability in Ireland which celebrated International Day of People with Disabilities, the programme will be rebroadcast on Newstalk at 7pm Saturday 25 April or you can listen back to the podcast.

In early March ADI announced that we were postponing From Access to Inclusion 2020 – An Arts and Culture Summit, now rescheduled from May to 22-25 March 2021. Since then our partners the Kennedy Center have also announced the postponement of their annual LEAD (Leadership Exchange in Arts and Disability) Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina scheduled for August.

That said, some conference and seminar organisers have decided to take their events virtual. Chicago Cultural Access Consortium coordinates monthly professional development programmes primarily targeted at cultural administrators. CCAC’s most recent seminar Leading Accessible Virtual Programs is available to view with captions and verbal descriptions on their YouTube channel. While this webinar is free, CCAC do welcome a voluntary $5 donation.

Two other conferences have caught our attention: A Future Date, a volunteer-led virtual event with 3 days of curated sessions that were cancelled at major accessibility conferences including the assistive technology conference CSUN ATC, SXSW. The purpose was to continue to support access professionals and advocates and provide learning opportunities that were missed due to Covid-19. While A Future Date has now concluded, all the sessions are available to view with captions on their YouTube channel.

Closer to home, AHEAD have reshaped their annual conference Through the Looking Glass into 10 weeks of webinars. Taking place on Friday afternoons until 29th May the focus is inclusion and access in different further and higher education contexts.