My leadership experience comes from my association with the Disability Advocacy Student Alliance (DASA), a University of Washington (UW) student club that serves as advocates for students with disabilities and for disability issues on the UW campus. As an undergraduate at the UW, I was a long-term member of the club. Shortly before the MLIS program began for me, I was elected as President of DASA and served a year long term from Summer 2006 until Summer 2007.
One of the two large projects that I organized as president was the Disability Awareness Program (DAP). A couple of years ago, DASA received money from the Office of Minority Affairs to create a program for staff and faculty to be educated on disability awareness and how to best help students with disabilities. The program was model after the successful Safe Zone project, which was the same type of program, but for LGBT issues. When I started as club president, an employee was already hired to create the program's curriculum and give the presentations. Unfortunately, the employee was unable to follow through with the task, forcing me to make the final decision to remove the employee from the project, which required me to work with the UW's Student Activity Office (the office that was paying our employee) to remove the employee, which required providing proper documentation of what was required for the program and why the employee failed to meet the expectations set out for the position
Afterwards, DASA attempted to find another employee to complete the program. I advertised for the position, organized a hiring committee of DASA members and members of other related groups, including the Disability Resource Services office, the Office of Minority Affairs, and the Disability Studies program. After reviewing the applications and not finding a suitable candidate with the specific requirements needed to both create and run DAP, the lack of qualified applicants being a problem that we ran into with the original hiring process, DASA decided to reevaluated how DAP was to be run. It was decided that DASA members and other interested parties would create the curriculum, and volunteers from the Disability Studies program would run the presentations, simultaneously filling their Disability Studies internship requirements. That money would be used to purchase equipment for the presentations. Shortly before my term as president expired, I contacted the Disability Studies program, set up meetings outlining the DAP curriculum and who would create it, and submitted the acquisition forms for the presentation equipment.
The other large project I organized was the third annual Body Fair, held on May 23rd, 2007. The Body Fair is a "Celebration of Mind, Body, and Disability", which is a small fair held on the lawn in front of the Husky Union Building. The fair includes both physical and performance art, as well as tables with local disability groups. The intention of the event is to bring awareness of disability and disability issues to campus and to show the idea that having a disability is not a "bad" thing, and people should be respected and celebrated for their differences. I was the primary organizer of the event, finding and hiring integrative dancers (dancers whos' performances included both disabled and abled dancers), recruiting disability groups to attend the event, as well as reserving lawn space, tables, and other necessary equipment. I also directed the set up of the event, including staffing and speaking schedules.
Other minor projects that I led during his year as DASA President was working with the staff of Viewpoints magazine, the UW's alumni magazine, to contact and set up a photo shoot with members of the local disability community for a disability-focused issue (and I even appeared on the front cover) and advertising the club to bring in new members and replace the graduating ones by organizing the creation and distribution of posters and placing booths in frequently-traveled locations around campus, which offered information about the club as well as other related organizations.
DASA is one of my most meaningful experiences during my Master's program as I learnt how to work with all kinds of other people - volunteers, employees, and administration, as well recruiting new members and drawing an interest from the general population. As an employee of a public library, I will have to work with same kinds of people - my bosses, my peers, those who work under me, library volunteers, and, of course, the patrons and local community that use the library. Being able to lead advertising of the library to the local community and run events and programming that are of interest to my patrons are all skills that I have experience in thanks to my time with DASA.
This page was last updated on Saturday, 19-Apr-2008 17:28:25 PDT.
Created and maintained by Timothy Shockley