Self-Advocacy

Interpreter: Now, we've made it to the last category on our agenda: Self-Advocacy. Understanding the importance of collaboration and how to successfully advocate for yourself is crucial. We've already given a lot of examples of how you can self-advocate. We've talked about your being assertive and asking for what you need, researching opportunities, talking with family and friends and so forth. Those are all forms of self-advocacy. For the remaining portion of this presentation, we'll talk about and give examples of collaboration and how it relates to self-advocacy. 

Collaboration. Collaboration can break down barriers. Working at something alone, you might become overwhelmed, over exert yourself, and ultimately hit a dead end. However, if you work collaboratively with others, you can be met with success much easier and sooner than if you had done it alone. So, who are you working collaboratively with? It could be working with the school, the local VR counselors, medical professionals, your family, different community members and service providers. You need to all work collaboratively as a team to be successful. You might be thinking, "well, I'm just a kid, they're the adults. They know what's best for me. I'm not really helping them, they're helping me," but you can change your mindset on this issue. Think about what is, and what isn't working for. You know what's best. Maybe a specific service or service provider isn't really working out. You are the guiding force on the team. Maybe for years you have stayed silent and received services that you feel aren't beneficial, or aren't working for you. While you may have put up with this in the past, it's time for you to speak up and self-advocate learn how to be the leader of the team. Speak up and successfully lead and collaborate with your team. We just spoke about collaboration. Collaboration requires that you start self-advocating. If you want to be independent, have a job, wake up on your own without relying on your family, then you need to make it happen for yourself. Be a self advocate now while you're in high school. Don't think "high school is just a time for me to relax and enjoy life. I'll worry about the serious stuff later." Start working on those important skills now. You won't perfect these skills overnight, they will take time and you will fail, but you can learn from those failures. It's best to learn now and you can improve ways of how to approach different situations. Advocating for yourself doesn't mean you will always be right and get what you want, but rather it's knowing what you want and need and learning how to communicate that in order to get it. Learn how to express that certain things aren't working out and identifying what is successful and working out. You have to make your needs known. That goes back to the importance of developing strong communication skills. All these skills are interconnected. Communicating well, ties into being a strong self-advocate and successfully collaborating with others.  

Part of self-advocacy, a very important part, is consistency. You'll want to ensure consistency in all areas of your life. Maybe we can break it down into three main areas: your home life, your school life, and when you're out in the community. Are your experiences in these three spaces consistent with one another? Let me explain further. Let's say that in your home life, you are quite independent. You get up on your own, you're able to function independently, but at school you've been assigned a one-to-one paraprofessional to help you throughout your day. There's a discrepancy between home and school. You can self-advocate and let the school know that you don't need the services of a one-to-one aid all day, but only in certain situations. Again, we are looking for consistency in your independence between all three areas of your life. Another example, it could be, let's say, at school, you learn all the ins and outs of banking. You learn the ins and outs of how to open a bank account and create a budget. You can take that information home and tell your parents that you'd like to open a bank account. Your parents can help you set up a bank account and you're off and running and managing your own finances. In this example, you learned a new skill at school and applied it to your home life, therefore achieving consistency between school and home. To add in the community piece, we can think about how the provision of sign language interpreters works. You were provided with interpreters at school, but what about community events? You'll have to self-advocate and ask for an interpreter at most community events. You are in charge of creating consistency in all areas of your life. Communication is of course the key in ensuring this. If you receive a certain service at school and would like it in the community, you'll have to be able to explain that to the event organizers or perhaps at home, you have a schedule that you follow that keeps you on track, and you'd like to have a schedule at school as well, to maintain consistency. You are not a passive bystander and all of this, you don't have to just follow what you are being told. You have a say, communicate your needs and advocate for consistency in all areas. Now, you know the importance of self-advocacy, but you won't be a perfect advocate all the time, and in fact, advocating can sometimes feel awkward, but know that there are many resources out there to support you Helen Keller National Center, as well as numerous other organizations and programs have resources that you can take advantage of. You can learn how to improve your self-advocacy muscles. You will make mistakes along the way, and that's fine. You can seek opportunities to improve yourself at Helen Keller National Center, your local State agencies, varying DeafBlind projects or the NCDB. Check out all the resources and see which is the best fit for you and your needs. Once you get connected with one of the agencies, they might provide you with additional resources, information, or actual training, but all of this work is up to you.  

I just spent a good amount of time talking about self-advocacy and being assertive, and you might be thinking to yourself, "I don't know if I can actually do that. I'm not sure if I'll be able to work, I'm DeafBlind. This is impossible. There's not much I can do." But, I'm here to say that you need to set high expectations for yourself. There are opportunities out there and you need to seek them out. You can achieve whatever it is you want to do. There's no place for an I can't attitude. Let me give you three amazing role models of DeafBlind women. The first is Haben Girma. She's a graduate of Harvard law school. 

Narrator: Here, we see a young woman smiling into the camera. She's wearing a blue blouse and pearls.  

Interpreter: The second is Isatou. Her dream was to be a Baker and she achieved it. She's actually currently working in a bakery.  

Narrator: Here's an image of Isatou. A young woman, smiling at the camera, wearing a Baker's outfit, standing in a bakery and holding up a tray of cupcakes with pink icing. 

Interpreter: The third DeafBlind woman is Maricar Marquez. She's a marathon runner and she's a supervisor at Helen Keller National Center. 

Narrator: [Here are two images of Maricar. In the first image Maricar is running a race. She has a number of pinned to her shirt, her hand is placed on the top of another person's hand who's running next to her. In the second image, Maricar is receiving tactile sign language at work.  

Interpreter: She also loves to travel the world. In addition to running, she's also been skydiving, rock climbing and done many other things. These are three examples of DeafBlind women who all do very different things very successfully, and you can be successful too. Set your goals and dreams and then work to make them come true. Well, we've made it to the end. We went through the top five keys to successful transition planning for DeafBlind youth. In review, the first was start early, the second was the importance of understanding your rights, third was exploring the differences between adult and youth services, the fourth was how to prepare for your future and job exploration, and the last was the importance of self-advocacy. Maybe you're feeling like you're ready to learn more on these topics, that's great! Or you might need some clarification on some of the information presented here. You might need to sit down with someone one-on-one to get more information, that's fine too. If you'd like some more information, please contact Debbie Fiderer.  

Narrator: Contact Debbie Fiderer at D E B B I E dot F I D E R E R @hknc.org.  

Interpreter: If you're interested in other trainings, technology, specific equipment, or assistive technology, head to HKNC's website, also listed on the screen. There are also additional resources available for transition age, youth and providers. You may want to ask your family members to also watch these sessions. There's additional resources available specifically for family members. There are trainings for school-based staff, parents, and others too. Ask your parents to check out the website and find resources just for them.  

Narrator: www.helenkeller.org/hknc.  

Interpreter: I hope you found this presentation helpful and clear. Again, my name is Chris, and we've come to the end of this training. Good luck to you!  

Narrator: Please go to our resource section for additional resources for transition-age youth, their family members and providers.

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