PHOENIX – People with disabilities will share their stories about friendship at a special event hosted by the National Center on Disability and Journalism.
The public is invited to join online on Wednesday, Nov. 20, from 4-6 p.m. Mountain Standard Time. To register, go to NCDJ Event Registration.
The event will feature the work of a dozen individuals from around the country who live with visible and invisible disabilities including autism, cerebral palsy, low vision, multiple sclerosis, Down syndrome and lupus. They will share stories they developed during a six-week workshop on storytelling taught by longtime Phoenix journalist Amy Silverman and Emyle Watkins, who reports on disability for WBFO, the NPR station in Buffalo, N.Y.
The workshop is part of a project to enhance the voices of people who live with disabilities and provide them with the tools to tell their own stories. It was developed by the NCDJ at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication with funding from the Human Services Research Institute, a nonprofit based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that works to identify sustainable solutions to complex challenges in health and social service delivery.
“People with disabilities have had few opportunities to tell their own stories for public audiences, and, yet, they have incredibly powerful stories to tell,” said NCDJ Executive Director Pauline Arrillaga, a professor of practice at the Cronkite School and a former editor at The Associated Press. “We’re excited to highlight the work of these very talented individuals.”
The stories will be posted in video format at ncdj.org following the public reading. The NCDJ also will create a guide for others who are interested in hosting workshops to amplify the voices of people with disabilities. The guide will be available next year.
For more information, contact Amy Silverman at amysilvermanaz@gmail.com or Pauline Arrillaga at Pauline.Arrillaga@asu.edu.
About the NCDJ: For nearly two decades, the National Center on Disability and Journalism at ASU has worked to improve how journalists around the world cover disability. The center offers training for journalists and other media professionals in how to better cover disability and publishes a widely used Disability Language Style Guide that has been translated into several languages.
About HSRI: The Human Services Research Institute is a Massachusetts-based national nonprofit organization founded in 1976 to advance community and person-centered service systems. It works with federal and state agencies to address the needs of underrepresented and marginalized populations in the areas of behavioral health, child and family welfare, housing and homelessness, population health, intellectual and developmental disabilities, and aging and physical disabilities.