June Update
Here’s what we’ve done for the month of June!
[Image Description: A white man is wearing a black shirt and brown glasses. He has a mustache. In the background there is a beige-colored wall with two paintings. The painting on the left depicts a small brown boat with green-blue seas and blue sky, white clouds, and bright yellow sun. The painting on the right shows a tan lighthouse, a red-roofed and bricked house, and a rocky trail right next to the beach.]
What did Adjacent Space do for the month of June? Go ahead and check it out!
[Image Description: A white woman with her brown hair resting on her left shoulder while wearing a black shirt is signing. The background shows a black backdrop.]
Equity Where We Live
Last month, we’ve established a new email address called compliance@adjacentspace.org. We’ve gotten emails from few people sharing their experiences, stories, and frustrations. We are approaching this in two different ways. First approach: we will share ADA regulations that has an application to your current situation, and you can learn what to do in order to advocate for yourself in that specific situation. Our second approach: we could contact businesses explaining that it is not the Deaf person’s responsibility to provide the interpreter—it is their (businesses) responsibility to provide an interpreter, according to ADA laws. We want to see your stories and frustrations so that we can see how we can support our community.
You might have noticed that for this month of June our team hasn’t done too many activities. We recognize that there are different events related to BLM. We’ve witnessed and participated in rallies, panel discussions and happenings and we decided and thought it best to hold off our activities for the time being to focus our time, energy, attention, and investing on what we should do next. We recognize our privileges, opinions, and biases and to analyze them. Our understanding of our privileges and inclusion needs to and must improve. We will continue to discuss with you, and within our team—dialogue will not end.
Equity Where We Work
[Image Description: A white man is wearing a black shirt and brown glasses. He has a mustache. In the background there is a beige-colored wall with two paintings. The painting on the left depicts a small brown boat with green-blue seas and blue sky, white clouds, and bright yellow sun. The painting on the right shows a tan lighthouse, a red-roofed and bricked house, and a rocky trail right next to the beach.]
What did Adjacent Space do for the “Work” category in month of June? We worked out with State of Alabama’s Department of Education to provide an interpreter for its press conference. We’ve started a conversation with Deaf Interpreters in Alabama, discussing about how we can promote, push, and improve more opportunities for Deaf Interpreters to interpret. Anna—she’s amazing, she wrote and published a policy on captioning and transcribing for our content that we produce. We’ve modified few things in our social media policy to make it look better. We’ve added more Deaf Alabama organizations on our website—we want to promote and spread awareness about these organizations! Finally, we added few initiatives on our donations page! That’s what we’ve done for the month of June.
Equity Where We Play
[Image Description: A brown-haired (wrapped in a bun) white young woman wearing a black shirt and brown glasses. The background shows a white wall.]
Equity where we live, equity where we work, and now equity where we play! We hosted two events in June. The first, on June 5th, was ASL Happy Hour! Via zoom, of course!
It was nice to see everyone virtually, and we played a trivia game. It was fun! The second event, on June 20th, was ASL Art at Home.
MANY thanks to Fred Miller for creating a video guiding us how to create a piece for Father’s Day. Thanks to everyone involved with these events! Be sure to keep an eye on our calendar for future events. Bye for now!
[Image Description at the end: a white background with two hands signing “equality” with large, bolded black words that read: ADJACENT SPACE. At the center of the image there is a triangle that depicts a colorful and vivid mix and swirl of colors that include the following: teal blue, green, gold, brown, gray, black, and dark colors.]